One of the things I like the most is to ask questions. Yes, I was one of those unsupportable little kids always asking "Why? What? When?" questions to their parents. And that need to learn new things from others is still there, alive.
That is why in the past weeks I have started an interviews' series in my blog I Love SEO, with interviews to Rand Fishkin and Will Critchlow and more in production.
The next one would have to be to Avinash Kaushik, maybe the most thoughtful leader about Analytics (sorry, I cannot call him "evangelist"... images of saints are too related to that word in my mind). But, due to the answers he gave me, I believe that is more useful for the SEO community to publish it here.
If I would have to define Avinash just with one word, I would use one he loves and uses a lot: "awesome".
Let me tell you: Avinash Kaushik is not just a great Analytics evangelist (ok, I used "evangelist"), but he is a great mind, a wonderful speaker, a generous man and a funny guy.
As many of us, I discovered Avinash thanks to his blog Occam's Razor and his books: Web Analytics an Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0. But Avinash gives the best of himself as speaker in conferences, and I had the luck to see him "in action" at Be-Wizard 2011 in San Marino and at MozCon in Seattle in July. His passion when speaking is such, that it is not strange that the tweet stream #mozcon, for instance, was filled with praises to Avinash by all the attendees. And it is not strange that he has an huge number of people following him on Twitter, ready to share every single tweet he publishes.
Gianluca: I am one of your 55K (and growing) followers on Twitter, which means more people than a European middle town has. Have you ever felt the weight of the responsibility of having such a huge number of people pending on your tweets?
Avinash: The number of people have never been material to me, I've felt the weight from day one.
I am deliberative about my social presence, in any channel, and give a lot of thought to how, and critically if, I should participate in it. My hope from day one is to provide something "incredible, relevant, of value." My tweets and Google Plus posts reflect my varied interests in design, politics, marketing, people and more.
But before I hit Submit or Post I pass it through this filter: "Will my audience find this to be incredible, relevant, of value", if it does it makes it through and I feel I've done my part to carry that weight with some responsibility.
Gianluca: I have to admit that your tweets I like the most are the off-topic ones, which you often catalog with #creative and #awesome. How much this search of the awesomeness in everything is essential in your work as an Analyst?
Avinash: I've always believed that people stop learning once they get out of school or college. The challenge with that is that we live in a world that is changing by the minute. So my quest to search for "awesomeness" is simply a reflection of the amount of reading I do, on diverse topics, as a part of my quest to learn something new. Hopefully every day.
And I have to admit that life is too small not to always look for exceptional things.
Gianluca: How much is it essential for businesses to understand the value of a well implemented Analytic figure in their structure? I am thinking especially of the small and medium enterprises, which usually tend to underestimate its strategic importance.
Avinash: A well implemented analytics data collection mechanism is an important price of entry. Without it you are coming to play the football game naked. You look embarrassing, and you are going to lose.
My hope though is that small and medium sized businesses will come to appreciate the value that actually using the data will have on their business. In as much I've pushed companies, of all sizes, to adopt the Digital Marketing & Measurement Model. That provides them with a very structured five step process to follow, ask the most important questions before they touch the data.
The end result is a better understanding of why it is that you need data, and once you get it how do you focus your efforts to ensure you are answering the right questions. With that comes an appreciation of why an investment in data is critical.
Gianluca: My blog is entitled I love SEO and SEOmoz, is surely one of the most important SEO community online. What do you like of this discipline from your personal perspective? Do you agree with me saying that no SEO can call himself so if he does not own a profound knowledge of Analytics?
Avinash: I love SEO. It is such a fascinating science and the rewards are awesome. The thing that appeals to me personally is that there are a, mostly, clear set of logical things we have to do in order to rank high for relevant keywords. It is fun to do those things at a system or marketing level.
It would not surprise you to learn that what is a lot of fun about SEO is the enormous amount of data available to understand your current situation, understand what it will take to get to the next step, and, my favorite, quantify the business impact of our SEO efforts. Without analytics it is impossible to even be 10% effective at doing SEO. And that is great! :)
Gianluca: Finally, what is the newest challenge of the Analytics science? Are maybe the Social metrics the new western frontier of Analytics?
Avinash: Social is just one more thing to think about, I am not sure that it is a "challenge" all by itself.
In terms of challenges I think there are a couple of very sophisticated ones.
First one is that consumer experience is evolving at such a fragmented rate that most places where we need data from are places where we don't have, to put it crudely, our analytics tools' analytics tags. That means that more and more of the data we need to be smart sits outside our immediate purview. Our ability to use APIs, scrapers, multiple tools is going to be super critical.
The second problem, perhaps even harder, is how to deal with this multiplicity from a data analysis perspective. Much of this data is missing primary keys, it is often incomplete, and sometimes even incorrect. And it is rich with information we can turn into actionable insight. Yet from a human capital perspective we don't have enough people with the right skills.
Time will solve both these problem. But I hope that current and future Analysts / Marketers appreciate this problem and start to invest the seeds of what it will take to solve them in the long term.
And now let me propose you something common to all my Interviews in Search: the Proust questionnaire.
What is your favorite word?
Passion.
What is your least favorite word?
Impossible.
What turns you on?
Ingenuity.
What turns you off?
Passive aggressiveness.
What sound do you love?
My kids expressing joy and delight.
What sound do you hate?
Hate is such a strong word.
What is your favorite curse word?
Suck!
What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?
Pilot, fighter jets.
What profession would you not like to do?
Any I don't want to do.
If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?
"You were wrong Avinash, I do exist!"
photo credits:
Avinash at MozCon: Thomas Ballantyne
Avinash at MozCon with Rand Fishkin: Dana Lookadoo
Avinash "snowball battle" in San Marino: Everywhereist
To me, Avinash is a mentor, an idol and a competitor. I constantly measure myself by how far away I am from influencing people and organizations the way he does. If, at the end of my career, people say "Rand moved our industry forward half as much as Avinash did," I'll know I've done well. I won't be satisfied, of course, but it'll still be an achievement :-)
Thanks for the interview Gianluca.
Why thank you Rand? Let's thank Avinash for his amazing and inspiring generosity.
p.s.: around these days I "celebrate" my third anniversary as Mozzer: consider this interview somehow as a gift I liked to do to the community :)
And now you can celebrate having over 5000 MozPoints and becoming an Oracle. Congratulations!
Thanks :). Not really imagining I would have go so far when started.
Oh yeah! I am one of Avinash's Market Motive Students. I'm going through the Analytics certification course. It is freakin AWESOME! I am bringing my knowledge in FULL circle from Architecture, SEO, PPC, Analytics.
Rand
this is one of the best feedback which i got on any post. I am very impressed with you but your feedback inspired me deeply.
Wonderful interview, Gianluca. It really shows the heart & passion that Avinash brings to tech industry and why he's such an inspiration.
Big fan of Avinash's blog he is deffiantly one of the key Analytics blogs I read on a regular basis, thanks for putting this interview together too Gianluca some interesting parts =)
I also agree that one of the best thing which is comming out of the Analytics space is the mesurment around social media data, Avinash's blog has some fantastic posts on it too.
here's a video of Avinash speaking at Think Marketing 2011https://youtu.be/ICOFIVfX2hQ
Absolutely great session with a lot of food for thought from Avinash!
Avinash brings a human touch to such a mechanized world. He hides his brilliance with his simplicity.
I am one of those guys who retweet, like and +1 almost every post of him and simply love his work and himself as a person and professionalist. Thank you Gianluca Fiorelli for such an amazing interview…
Avinash Kaushik is really an epic Mentor that I really wanted to meet someday in my life…
I like to read your interviews, Gianluca!They all have a personal touch - however they do give interesting insights.
I like best the last part - the "Proust questionnaire's"!
Thanks for the interview. Nice read!
Avinash is THE analytics Guru!
Great Interview! thanks for sharing on the Moz for us!!
I already had a huge #geekcrush on Avinash, but this interview plus that first photo just hit it home for me. :)
Thank you Gianluca for bringing Avinash's nice and friendly interview.I am thankfull to Avinash's Blog which helped me a lot from the begining of my career.
Do you know what's really cool? He donates all the profits from his two 'awesome' books to charities.
Who would of known that my heroes would end up being SEO & data geeks. :)
I really enjoyed your interview, Gianluca! I'm a big fan of Avinash and SEOmoz, and am glad you chose to post it here (that said, I can see I need to head to your blog more often to read even more of your thoughtful and friendly interview style).
Ahh...Nice interview. The way you answered.... , have never seen such kind of confidence.Great. And Loved The word PASSION...!!!! Unless and until won't have passion we won't get it.
I am one of his 58132 followers in twitter.
Thanks a lot Gianluca for the great interview...I really enjoy your way of interviewing people.
Gianluca, what a thoughtful and well presented interview! For me, the first question and the first answer set the tone. Avinash accepts the importance of his impact on others and carries it into his work. How many people see or accept it is not the question to him which says a lot about him as a person and as a professional. Yes, he is phenomenal at analytics and getting others to understand the importance of them along with the how to, but it is his approach that brings the weight to all he does: What I do matters and I must treat it as such.
Thanks for this great post.
Thank you! I really appreciate your comment.
In fact the reason at the base of my interviews is to be able to show the person behind the "rock-star", while still being able to present great infos about their vision of Search and Web Marketing industry/topics.
Avinash is a master of analytics, I am usually the culprit of sending around his analytics posts to the whole office.
But great interview, I think some interesting areas will be the social side of Analytics, I know the likes of Omniture are really pushing ahead in this area but Google Analytics are also on the case. Will be interesting to see who can offer the best social analytics offering in 2 years time.
I find the "Web Analytics TV" videos some of the most useful. He answers questions that are part of the everyday troubles of using analytics.
The WA TV videos are great but I prefer his blogposts because they're more like a "tutorial" on Web Analytics 2.0.
I agree with you, the Web Analytics TV series is surely something every SEO would have to follow.
Here's the link to the Google Analytics YouTube Channel, where you can see and follow this series: https://www.youtube.com/user/googleanalytics
Avinash is my hero! By simply reading his blog and books I got so many great tips to positively influence the way I work and the way my coworkers work!
Yes, he is not only a hero but a super hero. I always love to read his blogs and interviews. I always learn something new from him. I am facinate towards his work dedication and posite attitude.
i love this quote:
"Without analytics it is impossible to even be 10% effective at doing SEO. And that is great! :)"
that's why I love WA just as much as PPC & SEO :-)
Avinash is doing great job with GA and his book is almost sold in each part of the world. Many people are learn the things by his video, his blog, through social media and many more. I am great fan of Avinash and really inspire me a lot in many ways.
I am thankful to Gianluca for taking this interview and Fantastic post!
This has made me decide to purchase his book. Delivery within 3 - 5 days. Great stuff!
Maybe I would need to ask a % to Avinash ;)
Thank you! I really appreciate your comment. and liked to read the interview it was informative and learned a lot thanks for sharing
You can not get tired of Avinash. Such a clever mind for turning complexity into simplicity!
People like Avinash have great thinking ability and they have a power of changing the world's conventions.
@gfiorelli1
Avinash's achievements are milestone for all of us. He is an idol for me. I read his blog on regular basis, he is an inspiration for me as well as for many others. Whenever i read anything related to him gives me positivity. I am extremely happy to you for sharing such a fantastic chat session with him. I even loved the Rand's feedback on your post.
Thanks for the interaction info. It is #awesome to read and sure learning from Avinash lines.
Huge fan of Avinash! Really enjoyed reading the rapid fire questions toward the end of the post.
Gotta love someone who loves the word awesome so much... and who knows so much about analytics.
Who would of known that my heroes would end up being SEO & data geeks. :) [2]
This man is one of my heroes, read Web Analytics 2.0 is like to see the Matrix.
Great story, Avinash's passion for what he does is what I envy most about him. He seems like he loves what does on a truely personal level, which is great to see. Also his unabashed honesty.
I love his comment ". Without analytics it is impossible to even be 10% effective at doing SEO. And that is great! :)" and I think the Moz team has helped foster this 1000% by building a community that is based on testing and data the approach to SEO has moved light years from what it may have been with out this space for us to talk about and share the data and changes we see in the search results and influences over them.
Each and every blog post of SEOmoz is inspiring us to perform outstanding over our SEO campaign. Now, this series can help us to build up personal values in life and enable us to scale our self with few genius one! Specially thanks to Gianluca Fiorelli and best of luck to be no.1 in community rank. You will be there and that's for sure.
Good to see some NRI's providing expert supervision in the field of search engine technology. I didnt know he was taller than Rand as in the picture.
I liked a lot this "If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates? "You were wrong Avinash, I do exist!" - It's the truth that he knows very well :)
Gianluca you should get a % of Avinash's books sales you just convinced me as well. :)