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Must Haves and Can't Live Withouts
Google Tag Manager (free)
Google Tag Manager has been by far my most used tool in the last 2-3 years helping me and my clients to install advanced, reliable and creative tracking on their websites. If you are new to GTM check out our Beginners series.
Alternatives: Tealium, Adobe Launch, Segment.com
Google Sheets (free)
Working with data is working with Spreadsheets. When it comes down to the nitty gritty I’ve come accustomed to pull up a Google Sheet and start capturing, analyzing and sharing my data through Sheets. It’s truly the Swiss Army Knife of Measurement and will stay of the heart of any Analyst for decades to come
Alternatives: Excel, Tableau, R
Google Analytics (free)
Capturing, storing, processing and visualizing data seems ubiquitous nowadays. But from the beginning Google Analytics has given me a framework to work with. Admittedly, you need to by into this system, but I also can’t argue with the price tag of free. So it’s still my choice for everything website tracking
Alternatives: Snowplow Analytics, Yandex Metrica
ActiveCampaign (starts at $9/month)
Our Email Marketing tool of choice helps us to send the right message, to the right people at the right time. But for us it’s not just a tool to do Email Marketing, but also an Analytics platform where we record events, qualify our prospects and send users through sequences. All in all a great automation tool to go from data to action in no time.
Alternatives: Drip, Klaviyo, Infusionsoft
Chrome (free)
When it comes Apps on my Computer, I live in Chrome. Not only is it my window to all the tools you see above, but it has been become a quit powerful tool for marketers as well. The Chrome Dev Tools are handy for troubleshooting errors and the slew of extensions make my life as a marketer easier than ever.
Alternative: Firefox
Analytics Tools
Google Tag Manager (free)
Google Tag Manager has been by far my most used tool in the last 2-3 years helping me and my clients to install advanced, reliable and creative tracking on their websites. If you are new to GTM check out our Beginners series.
Alternatives: Tealium, Adobe DTM
Google Analytics (free)
Capturing, storing, processing and visualizing data seems ubiquitous nowadays. But from the beginning Google Analytics has given me a framework to work with. Admittedly, you need to by into this system, but I also can’t argue with the price tag of free. So it’s still my choice for everything website tracking
Alternatives: Snowplow, Yandex Metrica
Google Sheets (free)
Working with data is working with Spreadsheets. When it comes down to the nitty gritty I’ve come accustomed to pull up a Google Sheet and start capturing, analyzing and sharing my data through Sheets. It’s truly the Swiss Army Knife of Measurement and will stay of the heart of any Analyst for decades to come
Alternatives: Excel, Tableau, R
Google Forms
The best strategy to get quick insight is to ASK. With Google Forms you have a quick an easy tool available to get qualitative Data into your Analytics mix. Receiving feedback, profile customers or do a simple quiz is easily built with Forms. And the best of all it connect to Google Apps so you can extent, like building little tools like our Google Analytics Refundr around it.
Alternative: SurveyGizmo, Survey Monkey, Typeform
Google Data Studio
GA or Google Sheets is not pretty. But sometimes you need to go the extra mile to make data presentable. With Data Studio we now have a free dashboarding tool available to vizualise data, share and present it. With Supermetrics this really get’s powerful.
Alternatives: Klipfolio, Tableau, Google Sheets
Supermetrics
Getting data into my favorite analysis tools (Google Sheets and Google Data Studio) is always done via Supermetrics. This little Add-On to Sheets and GDS makes retrieving data painless. It connects to so many sources and can easily be scheduled to always have the right data updated.
Automation & Actionable Analytics
ActiveCampaign
Our Email Marketing tool of choice helps us to send the right message, to the right people at the right time. But for us it’s not just a tool to do Email Marketing, but also an Analytics platform where we record events, qualify our prospects and send users through sequences. All in all a great automation tool to go from data to action in no time.
Alternatives: Drip, Klaviyo, Infusionsoft
Google AppsScript
To make data actionable, you need to connect it to tools that can directly make an impact (like your Email Marketing tool). Connecting data sources is not always straight forward, but Google Apps Script is my go-to tool to connect differen data sources. I have done it for ActiveCampaign, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and more… With a bit of JavaScript you can easily replace Zapier.
Alternative: Zapier
Video Production
Trello
Our Project Management Tool – This is how we keep organized. We input task from the videos we are going to produce to which changes need to be done on the website on Trello. Visually it’s quite appealing and that’s why we have also build our GTM Vault (inside of or MeasureMasters program) with Trello.
Alternative: Asana, Jira
Google Drive
All our files live in the cloud. It’s great for sharability and quick access on mobile phones as well. I love that it’s so simply integrates in our GApps domain and everyone on the team has instant access.
Alternative: Dropbox, CoudDrive
TubeBuddy
Great tool for managing a YouTube Channel. Makes life easier and YouTube optimization fun. The number one feature I use on this is to upload our videos directly to Facebook. Then we don’t need to manually go in an repost everything. A real life saver for our Channel.
Alternative: VidIQ
more Video Gear
Ever changing (check out our complete list here), but at the core it’s still the Panasonix Lumix G7, a nice 25mm prime lense (for the blurry background) and a Sennheiser Mic for crystal clear sound.
Alternative: Sony A6500
Wirecast
Live-Streaming is done with this piece of software. It gives us great control over the streams that go out to YouTube and Facebook and also let’s us do some fancy animation and intro stuff. Have a look at our past live steams.
Alternatives: OBS
Screenflow
Our tutorials are mostly Screencast and to record them I use Screenflow (Mac) – It’s a great piece of software to get a professional look on these Screen Recording videos.
Alternatives: Camtasia, Screen-Cast-O-Matic
Training and Courses
Ben L. Collins Spreadsheet Courses
Diving deeper into Analytics will inevitably lead you to using a Spreadsheet software. Currently the most knowledgeable person about data analysis in Google Sheets, imho, is Ben Collins. I’ve interviewed him here and also dearly recommend his courses. I had a number of students reporting that they are well worth it and when taking a look for myself I’ve been impressed by the way Ben explains and makes it all applicable to those working with data.
Books
Practical Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for Developers (Jonathan Weber)
What’s the best book on GTM? It’s not that hard to answer,because there are not many out there. Jonathan Weber, from Lunametrics fame, has written a fantastic guide that covers all the basics of GTM. Unfortunately, it was already published in 2015 and since GTM is ever-changing there are quite a few new features more available then are in the book. Nonetheless a great read to get to grips with basics of GTM and underlying principals.
Lean Analytics (Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz)
The Lean Startups Approach was made famous by Erik Reis in 2011. I loved the initial viewpoint on how to build Startups the Lean way. I was even more intrigued once the Lean Analytics book appeared on the market. Now, there are dozens of frameworks out there that help you make better decisions with data. This one is especially interesting, because it helps simplify Analytics down to the important bits. I find the concepts of a book a great help when trying to explain a simple Analytics process to beginning companies (startups).
Successful Analytics (Brian Clifton)
Looking for a clean approach to Google Analytics? Brian Clifton has written a great best-practice guide on how to approach our modern measurement challenges. This book helped me in particular to understand the nuances that businesses nowadays face when it comes to a useful analytics implementation. It was a great read that I reference often.
Google Analytics Breakthrough (Feras Alhlou, Shraz Asif, Eric Pettman)
