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Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics, GA4 tutorials & alternatives, new 'lower price' badge, Google Unconference 2022, Brighton SEO April 2022

Jack Chambers-Ward
Jack Chambers-Ward , Marketing and Partnerships Manager
28.03.2022 • 32 min read • Podcast

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What's in this episode?

In this episode Mark Williams-Cook and Jack Chambers discuss:

  • Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics
  • GA4 tutorials & alternatives
  • New 'lower price' badge on Google
  • Google Unconference 2022
  • Brighton SEO April 2022

Show notes and links

Google Analytics 4:

SISTRIX:

Events:

Transcript

Jack: Welcome to episode 11 of season two of the Search with Candour podcast. Recorded on Wednesday, the 23rd of March 2022. My name is Jack Chambers, and I'm joined by my regular cohost, Mr Mark Williams-Cook. And today we'll be talking about the sunsetting of Universal Analytics coming up in 2023, Google Analytics 4 tutorials, and possible alternatives to Google Analytics 4, a new badge for low prices in the product browse feature, Google Unconference 2022 and BrightonSEO coming up in April 2022.

Jack: Search With Candour is sponsored by SISTRIX, the SEO's toolbox. Go to sistrix.com/swc if you want to check out some of their excellent free tools, such SERP snippet validation, on-page analysis, hreflang validation, page speed comparison, and tracking your site's visibility index. That's sistrix.com/swc for free SEO tools, sistrix.com/trends for TrendWatch, and sistrix.com/blog for all of their regular blog posts. Some of which we'll be talking about later on in the show.

Mark: OK, we get to start with what we wanted to talk about last Wednesday, but the thing Google announced an hour after we recorded the podcast.

Jack: It was literally minutes after we finished recording, yeah.

Mark: So we record these on a Wednesday, so we have time to edit them and Jack make them sound nice before Monday. And as soon as we finished the episode last week, the Google Analytics team or the Google marketing platform team, I should say, on their blog, which is just blog.google, published a post entitled Prepare for the Future with Google Analytics Four. Which kind of leads the way to then basically saying, "Because we're taking away Universal Analytics-

Jack: Pretty much.

Mark: ... and you have no choice."

Jack: Yeah. Yeah. Because it's been the advice for a while, right? We knew this is going to come eventually. They're going to eventually move over to GA4. We've touched on GA4 a couple of times on the show already. Even since I've been here, we've touched on it a couple of times in the last 10 episodes or so in season two.

Jack: But yeah, actually confirming we're going to get a date where Universal Analytics is going to cut off. The fact that SEO Twitter exploded as soon as this happens, because a lot of people, and again, as we've touched on previously, a lot of people don't like GA4. We apparently have one person here in the studio who does. But yeah, the only person I think I've ever met, who does.

Mark: Yeah. So I don't think people saw this happening as quickly as it did. Everyone was discussing saying, "Yeah, they're probably going to make us do this at some point." And it felt like there was kind of no lead up in that Google has been pushing, and I think we commented, like you said, a few episodes ago when you set up analytics now the default one is, "Hey, use GA4." Rather than the whole, "You can run this in parallel." It's just, "Yeah. Use this." And a lot of people were saying, "Okay, it's still buggy. The reports don't give us what we need." And I think that there's some truth in that. There's definitely been problems. Our team uses GA4 on some clients, and there have definitely been just errors in that interface.

Jack: Especially when we're connecting it with Data Studio and other interfaces and things like that. Yeah, we've seen a fair bit.

Mark: Yeah. And, but I think I feel a lot of this is still down to, people hate change.

Jack: You're not wrong. Yeah.

Mark: I mean, the broad public example is when Facebook had their big UI change that's probably a couple of years ago now. And everyone was like, "Oh, I hate this. I'm leaving Facebook." And people kind of moaned for a bit. Facebook just stood their ground. And then that became what Facebook was. So when they change it again, people just complain all over again. And there's loads of psychology behind that, about people just getting used to doing things in a way, and it's frictionless. And then you change it, and you create friction, and the Steve Crump thing of, "You made me think, so I hate you."

So I think some of it is to do with that. Some key dates. So this may be, this still may be news to some people, because I was onboarding a client yesterday and looking, and they hadn't heard about this and they're still running Universal Analytics. Some key dates and why this really is a big announcement is that I think people care more about the fact that Universal Analytics, they're going to stop processing new hits on the first of July 2023.

So this means, even if you just keep your Universal Analytics running, it's just going to stop collecting data. If you're paying the, I don't know if it's like a 100, 150 grand a year for 360, that's going to stop on October the first 2023. But then, this is what I found surprising, they're saying they will retain your data for at least six months from each of those dates. But then obviously it's going to go, I assume, if they're saying it's not going to be retained anymore.

And what surprised me about that was that there's no option basically to pay to keep it, which makes me think that this move, the speed of this move, the fact that they're not offering data retention has more to do with legal implications of the type of data they've collected all the various privacy laws, which have changed massively over the last 10 years. And they're just sitting on a massive legal hand grenade and they're like, "Nope, we just want to flush all of this. And then we've got a clean slate."

Jack: Absolutely. There's a direct quote here from the blog post from the Google team. As always, we will link to it in the show notes search.withcandour.co.uk. Here's the direct quote. "And though Universal Analytics offers a variety of privacy controls, Google Analytics Four is designed with privacy at its core. Provide a better experience for both our customers and their users." Designed with privacy at its core. I think totally sums up what you were just saying there, Mark, about the insurmountable amount of issues there's been with recent introductions of GDPR, and cookie problems, and all kinds of stuff. These massive tech companies that have tracking data, and user data, and IP addresses, and all kinds of stuff is now becoming more and more troublesome from a legal standpoint. I think this is very clearly a Google move, a conscious move from Google to move away from that kind of stuff and really build a safety net for themselves going forward, so they don't land in with hundreds of millions of dollars of lawsuits, and sanctions and stuff in the future.

Mark: Sure. If you have been hiding from GA4-

Jack: I have.

Mark: ... like many people have, you might want to check out episode 89 in episode- sorry, in season one that we'll link to, because amongst other people we've interviewed Krista Seiden, who is one of the leading experts on GA4. She actually worked for seven years leading project management efforts across the Google marketing platform. So there are few people, I would say probably on the planet, better to speak to, or listen to rather about GA4 than Krista. So we did a whole interview about getting started with GA4 and what it's all about and the differences. So that's a really nice place to start if you just need some hand-holding and some intro.

Jack: I watched a little tutorial video not too long ago and I recommended it to the rest of the Candour team in on one of our weekly catch-ups recently. From Analytics Mania on YouTube, also real name Julius Fedorovicius. I apologise, Julius, if I'm not pronouncing your name correctly. Basically just has a 2021, and now an updated 2022 GA4 tutorial for beginners that I found really, really useful to just kind of wrap my head around some of the basics about setting up accounts and moving over from Universal Analytics to GA4. About an hour long. It's 57 minutes, something like that on YouTube, and a really, really helpful little summary of a lot of the key factors we're all going to be encountering when we have to move over to GA4.

Mark: I think there's, on a silver lining, I guess? If you're working in digital, and analytics, and SEO and PPC, there's an opportunity here, or there's going to be a shortage of people that are good at GA4, because there are people who will just be hiding under a rock until doomsday has come and gone.

Jack: Until they're dragged out from under that rock, kicking and screaming.

Mark: Exactly. So, the quicker you do either scale up in GA4, or other analytics platforms, or all of the different options available, the better. If you've got existing clients, you need to be talking to them about, "Okay, how do we move across data we've got? How do we keep what we've got? How do we start tracking in a new way, moving away?" Because a lot of these platforms now I have noticed, so when we're going through these alternatives to Google Analytics, one of the main differences between GA4 and Universal Analytics is, Universal Analytics is the very familiar session-based, page view-based metrics, which we've had for years and years. But actually, when we were looking through the alternatives, most of the new alternatives are the same as GA4 in that they're event-based. This is the future of analytics. And this is all wrapped up with what you said around cookie-less and all the kind of things we do with-

Jack: You're adhering to all those privacy laws that are still growing to this day as legislators and lawmakers understand technology better.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. That's a slow process.

Jack: Or not in some cases. Yeah, exactly.

Mark: I had a quick look, actually at Krista's Twitter to see if she had anything recent she was saying about GA4. And she actually posted her pet peeve, which I hadn't heard yet. But this is from Krista saying, "Pet peeve, people calling GA4, just G4. It's not the fourth version of Google, not Google's fourth most important product, et cetera. It's the fourth version of Google Analytics, hence GA4/rant."

Jack: I had seen G4 a few times and had assumed they were talking about the video games channel from back in the day. They recently researched... But yeah, and they're not talking about G4, the video game channel.

Mark: Is that like a YouTube Channel?

Jack: Yes. It's now on YouTube. It used to be a TV show back in the day, but now it's on YouTube. And once one of the OG of video game YouTube channels. But we're not talking, we're not talking about G4.

Mark: No, I never saw that.

Jack: Oh, it's really good.

Mark: I used to watch Games Master.

Jack: Oh, I love a bit of Games Master.

Mark: And Bits.

Jack: Nice.

Mark: Which was on really late. Anyway... "It's GA4, not G4. Get in line," Krista says.

Jack: Pretty much, pretty much. If you're going to listen to anyone, listen to Krista.

Mark: So let's talk about some alternatives. I had a look. There's some, I kind of went through some Twitter threads just to see what alternatives people had been suggesting and what ways around people are looking at doing this. But some people are obviously just being like, "Yeah, fine. We've got to use GA4." Other people I think out of spite, kind of like, "Nope, we're going to use something else now."

Jack: Pretty much. Yeah.

Mark: And interestingly, when I was digging into the issues because again, this is like you have people complain about something, but it's important to actually say, "Okay, well what are you not satisfied about? What are the problems?" And with GA4, it seems to be a lot of issues with the front end and actually using GA4 and accessing the data and useful reports.

Mark: So one of the things I'm seeing a lot of people doing is using BigQuery as a front end. And this is one of the big advantages actually of GA4, which is, there is a data export now to BigQuery for free, which didn't exist in Universal Analytics. So I believe you used to have to pay for that in 360 to get that. But this is something that's native out-of-the-box with GA4, and you only pay for the actual data storage and data querying when you exceed the limits of the Google cloud free tier.

So I think it's, you're charged after one terabyte of querying per month, and 10GB of storage. Off the top of my head. That may have changed. But basically, it's pretty cheap for a large amount of data. And I think that's one option we're going to be exploring now moving toward using BigQuery for all clients. I think it's certainly got merits. Obviously, we use a mashup with Data Studio at the moment, but I think this is going to be more suitable and ongoing. Another alternative I've seen outside of GA4 is called, Piwik? I think I'm pronouncing that correctly? Piwik? It's-

Jack: Oh, I like Piwik.

Mark: It's P-I-W-I-K. Piwik Pro. And I had a look at this. It's got a core plan that's basically free for up to 500,000 monthly actions. So again, actions, this is event-based-

Jack: Event-based.

Mark: ... tracking. It's got 14 months of data retention. And again, this is a modular system that has analytics, a tag manager so you can deploy tracking from other platforms, and a consent manager as well. So again, a lot of these platforms are now looking at making sure they're compliant as well. And I believe you found one called Plausible?

Jack: Yeah. Again, I did a similar kind of thing you were talking about earlier where I scour through Twitter, seeing the replies, #GA4, what are people talking about? And that kind of thing. And Plausible Analytics sells itself, again, by going for that privacy angle. I know we touched on a few previously where they really are upon the no cookie, fully compliant with GDPR, et cetera, et cetera. That is the kind of thing Plausible is going for. I saw some hesitancy from some other SEOs and some developers and things like that about Plausible. And I haven't used it myself I hasten to add. So this is not a recommendation or anything like that, it's just something I saw in conversation. The fact that it sells itself as a lightweight and open-source analytics platform. A lot of people find that a lot of the more lightweight platforms are not as interesting and diverse with the data they actually collect and stuff like that, and might not be suitable for larger accounts or agencies and things like that.

So, do your research, go and have a look, but they do have a pretty clear pricing platform based on the amount of traffic you're basically getting through. And interestingly, it is traffic-based, not event-based or at least in their wording on their pricing page. Going everything from nine pounds a month for 10 K a month in terms of traffic, all the way to 169 pounds a month for 10 million visitors to your website a month. And pretty much everything in between from 100,000 - 500,000, a million and a couple of other ones between there as well. So yeah, a wide range there. Have a look, do your research. I know one we touched on recently as well was Matomo? We touched on that a couple of episodes ago.

Mark: So I mean, Matomo's got a self-hosted version that's kind of free, because you're hosting it. And then they had the cloud-hosted versions. That's kind of a similar price. So for what they call 100,000 hits, which I mean, I don't know how everyone's using their terminology here? I mean a hit is technically a server request. So I'm guessing that means-

Jack: So we've got 500,000 monthly actions, 500,000 traffic, 100,000 hits.

Mark: Yeah. So I think we need to make sure we're comparing apples and apples here? I'm guessing that means events?

Jack: That would be my assumption from the word, hit.

Mark: But that's £29 a month. So again, not hugely expensive. I've seen a lot of people. We mentioned Matomo obviously a few episodes ago. It's I think by far the most popular alternative I've seen spoken about.

Jack: Same here. Yeah.

Mark: A few people thought that, again, I've seen this, with our big clients we just have to do GA4 because that's industry-standard, follow the herd kind of thing. And there's, nobody got fired for hiring IBM approach of, if you bet with Google you're unlikely to come unstuck. Whereas, if you convince some blue-chip company to go onto whatever third party cloud analytics, and then they go bust or they get bought and everything changes in two years, then you could be in a very difficult situation.

So when it comes to, especially retention of data long term, I think a lot of bigger companies will just bet on big names on the idea that they're going to be around. But that said, there's lots of options now in terms of you've got this data collection side of things, and then you've got this warehousing. So one suggestion made by Gerry White that I hadn't heard of before was Snowplow and Snowflake, which I had a quick look at. And Snowplow, I'll read you the little one-liner from their site there, "Generate complete, accurate and well-structured event data across all platforms and channels in a common format with the Snowplow behavioural data platform." So again, sounds very similar to GA, event-based whether it's an app, website, it's collecting the same events.

Snowflake is their data warehousing solution. So then that's about actually working with the JSON schema that Snowplow has generated and storing that. But you can use Snowplow with other warehousing solutions like Azure or AWS. So there's all kinds of options about actually, which you don't have to just use the Google route or you don't have to just use the Matomo route. You can decide which one of these platforms is best for you and you can collect the data, and then you can store it somewhere else and warehouse it, because some of these analytics platforms as well, obviously have limitations on how long they're going to keep data for. You mentioned earlier about Luke in our team who is our cheerleader for GA4 internally. He's doing a great job. I actually, so Luke, I do actually agree with Luke. There's lots of reasons why moving to this event-based kind of stuff is good when we're talking about, especially joining up data with other marketing platforms, CRMs, contextual data. When we want to leverage data as an input for machine learning models, we've touched again a few times about all of the wild AI tools that are pretty much off the shelf now that you can put data into and get helpful analysis out of. Different ways to visualise data as well in different tools and being able to make sure if it is compliant, the data, then you can store it for longer because you haven't got people's personal information basically. So I think there is a lot of benefits to doing this and we just have to get on with it.

Jack: I think the long term storage of data is such a contentious issue when it comes to Google Analytics. And again, talking to Luke about it the other day, I sit next to Luke in the studio. So we have a lot of conversations about this kind of thing. And even with all the pros that may come with GA4, Google talking about the very limited window in which you can store data for. I think warehousing and stuff is going to be essential going forward. And think about how you can store an archive and warehouse your current data you have on your analytics platforms, or whatever else analytics platforms you're using. Because we seem to be moving in this direction where long term storage of data and long term tracking is becoming less and less common because it clashes with those privacy laws, and those data laws, and all that kind of stuff.

So, yeah, we're going to have to look into some serious long term storage of tracking data and things to be able to do things like year-on-year analysis, which I feel is such a key thing in SEO, especially looking at long term strategies. You've been working on a site or with a client for two years, five years, whatever it is? Being able to track stuff from, "Oh, when we started, it looked like this. Two years in, it looks like this. Now five years in, it looks like this." You won't be able to do that going forward necessarily.

Mark: So useful, unless you're trying to compare it to a pandemic year.

Jack: Well, that's true. Yeah. We don't talk about the pandemic. That time is a flat circle. Don't talk about the pandemic. The amount of clients we've onboarded recently were like, "Oh yeah, we had a really great..." Or, "We had a really terrible 2021 and 2020. So, can you compare it to 2019 statistics?" I'm like, "Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Yeah." It's a tricky one. But definitely something you guys should be thinking about, whether that's looking into alternatives. And as we said, links to all the options and links to all these kind of things, including the information about GA4, the tutorials, the episode and the discussion Mark had with Krista in the past, all available at search.withcandour.co.uk.

Jack: So, we're at the midpoint in the show, let's dive into some more information from SISTRIX, and they have highlighted an interesting thing in their blog this week, talking about the EU sanctions that have affected the Russia Today website, which is rt.com, for those of you who don't know. I've actually seen it basically completely drop out of Google, which is very, very unusual if you've been aware and keeping track of data for this kind of thing in the long term. Johannes Beus, who has written this article is talking about how unusual this is. So EU sanctions are now affecting many different Russian companies and Russian sites and things like that across the European Union. And Russian Today, the news site, is no exception. Interestingly, they even dive into the UK side of things, because thanks to Brexit here in the UK, we are not as part of the EU, these sanctions don't necessarily apply.

So we still have access and Google is still indexing rt.com for us here in the UK. So it's an interesting thing to compare and contrast data from the EU side of things, looking at things like Google search console, and then looking at the UK side of things and seeing the rankings for keywords across both as well. SISTRIX do a great job of diving into that data and comparing, contrasting and looking at the data side of things of what's happening with the world and its relationship with Russia at the moment, and all the emission decisions and sanctions that are happening. It's a really interesting digital marketing look at something that most people probably don't want to spend their time thinking about or talking about while they're working. But it is an interesting piece of data to dive into nonetheless.

And of course, we always like to touch on TrendWatch here on Search with Candour and we'll have another one coming up very soon. Coming up on Thursday, the 7th of April, we will have April's TrendWatch. And if you don't know, your first I'm listening to the show, you've never heard me talk about SISTRIX before, TrendWatch looks at thousands of search volume developments and every month analyses 10 new trends and the backstory that's associated with them.

We've touched on everything from TikTok octopuses, all the way through to, I talked about air fryers on an episode when Mark wasn't here and spent five minutes talking about how much I love my air fryer. All kinds of interesting trends! And relating to the TikTok octopus, perhaps, we'll be talking about an Axolotl Squishmallow coming up in April. So get excited for that, listeners. And if you'd like to get ahead of the game and sign up for that newsletter can go to sistrix.com/trends. You can sign up for the TrendWatch newsletter, all 10 trends delivered straight to your inbox every single month.

Jack: So we touched on some options for a lovely little badge. I know you love that 10-pixel badge we talked about a few weeks ago, Mark. We're getting another badge being tested by Google in search results at the moment.

Mark: We're going to end up like how the Scouts-

Jack: Yes.

Mark: ... have all their little badges down their arm? Now we've got a website.

Jack: And you've got your product stories and your lower price badges. And yeah, and my partner's mom is a scout leader. So I'll go and ask her for one of those sashes and stuff. And we can get all our little Google official badges.

Mark: Maybe that could be like a spinoff store we could do where we make physical versions of all the Google badges?

Jack: Just to “undigital” your marketing with these.

Mark: You can add it to your staff uniforms, can't you?

Jack: Oh my God. We'll end up looking like Navy admirals or something like that.

Mark: Like the North Korean army with all the sashes.

Jack: Exactly. Yeah. So it was highlighted by Brian Freiesleben. Again, apologise if I've mispronounced your name there, Brian. Highlighted to us on Twitter, "If you beat Google's understanding of an average retail price, you get this neat little with a little star emoji as well. It has a little sparkle emoji, “lower price” badge. When using the product browse feature in the SERP, I expect to see Google testing other placements in the future. And this is definitely something to watch." And it is, literally, a nice little blue sparkle and it says lower price.

And basically, if you're listing something or if you find something that is lower than the average price for the rest of those articles, and the example Brian uses here is a coffee table from Ikea that is selling for at $65. And usually, coffee tables are like $200. So it's highlighted there as this is lower than the average price. Cool little feature and get yourself some badge. Add that to your badge collection. PPC people you're using Google shopping, add it to your badges. Collect them all now.

Mark: I thought it'd be nice to round off this episode just with a couple of events because Google Unconference 2022 is coming up. And if you have not heard of it or do not know what Unconference is, it's the third edition of this interactive virtual event from Google. It actually started during lockdown, during the, obviously, the pandemic in 2020 when Google was having conferences. And then suddenly you could not have conferences anymore.

Jack: I hate they're on the third annual thing that started in the pandemic. I hate everything about that sentence.

Mark: I know. Yeah. I don't even want to spend too long on that one.

Jack: Let's not dwell on that. Let's not dwell on that.

Mark: So what's interesting about Unconference is, as you maybe have to guess is, it is not a conference. And by not a conference, it means that there are no speakers and there are no presentations, and it is not recorded. So what on earth is it? It's basically a collection of group discussions, and each of those discussions have one or two facilitators. And their job is just to make sure there is a starting point for everyone to have the conversation. And they just help keep momentum throughout the session and they make sure everyone gets a chance to talk. And if you want to participate, you just need to have a mic. Camera's optional. As I say, it's not recorded. You can actually as well apply to become a facilitator. But this is open for registration from Wednesday. So that's assuming you're listening to this on Monday, it's open for registration on the 30th of March, which is Wednesday.

The actual event itself is on the 27th of April at 4pm British summertime running to seven o'clock so that's PM, British summertime. So if you haven't attended before really cool discussions, very different to the usual kind of format if you haven't checked it out before. We'll put a link as usual in the show notes for that. And I wanted to mention as well, the biggie, which is BrightonSEO, which is coming up in a couple of weeks' time. So BrightonSEO runs the 7th - 8th of April. There's actually some training and fringe events on the sixth as well. The day before. If you can't guess, it's in Brighton. It's at-

Jack: The clue's in the name.

Mark: Yeah, it's at the Brighton Center. And I saw someone asking the other day on Twitter that was speaking there asking Kelvin, one of the founders if it's the biggest in Europe or something because they were speaking and they wanted to put it on their CV or whatever. And I think he said it was easily the largest SEO conference in the world. I was like, "Oh that's surprising." But then I was like, "Not really, I guess." Because SEO is, it feels big when you're inside it, but it's not really, it's still pretty niche.

Jack: Like a tardis, bigger on the inside.

Mark: That's one of your references, actually despite not being a Dr Who fan.

Jack: There we go. I haven't watched Doctor Who in nearly 10 years. Yeah.

Mark: So yeah, largest SEO conference in the world, I think, asterisks. Loads of talks. So I've just got a dozen here I picked:

  • AI and MarTech as a Game Changer to Empower SEO Strategy
  • An Introduction to Advanced Schema Auditing
  • How Do You Optimise the World's Largest Website?
  • How They Teach You to be Creative at Google
  • Avoiding the Pitfalls of International SEO
  • Brand versus SEO, How to Win Allies and Influence Brand Guardians
  • How To Incorporate Machine Learning in Your Internal Link Auditing
  • Duckduckgo: Privacy and the Future of Search
  • EAT: Have we been looking at it backwards?
  • Goodbye to SEO F***-ups: Learn how to set an SEO quality assurance framework.

So there's way more of talks than that, but as you can see from that cross-section, there are practical talks that tell you what you need to be doing. There's inspirational talks from various people that have worked in different places to share their experience. There's theoretical talks. So there's pretty much something for everyone. I checked the, so this year we've got a few of us from Candour going down. I'm doing a talk this year. My one's going to be about zero volume keywords and just using them in your SEO strategy.

Jack: “Effective Zero Volume Keyword Research and Why It's Important, by Mark Williams-Cook”.

Mark: That's the one.

Jack: There you go.

Mark: And I actually checked the last time I spoke at BrightonSEO was in 2010.

Jack: Wow.

Mark: And I think-

Jack: I don't know if I knew what SEO was then.

Mark: So every single person-

Jack: I was 19.

Mark: Every single person that attended brightonSEO that year came to my talk.

Jack: Because it was in a room of a hundred people?

Mark: Not a hundred. I think it was like 30, maybe?

Jack: Oh wow.

Mark: Yeah. It was pretty small.

Jack: And now to scale up, what's the current auditorium attendance level?

Mark: It's a few thousand.

Jack: It's about 3,000 according to the guide.

Mark: And it's really amazing actually what Kelvin built. He'll do his story I think, again, if it's your first time there. But it was really interesting the first few, how far people were travelling for a really small, at the time, really small basically get-together because the industry was so small. And now it's obviously grown out. But even if you're in a position where you look at a lot of these talks and you're like, "Oh, I know a lot of this." Big old big head. It's a really good place to actually meet a lot of people because I speak to a lot of people online.

Jack: Yes. Think of all the people you talk to on Twitter, or you follow on LinkedIn, or whatever it is, you can actually meet them in person, including Mark. And even me, I guess. Some people follow me also.

Mark: Yeah. And I think that's kind of cool because you build up an image, at least in your head, of what these people are like and it's cool meeting them. And-

Jack: How tall do you think the Mark is?

Mark: Yeah, exactly.

Jack: You're going to find out-

Mark: You're going to find out.

Jack: -if you attend brightonSEO.

Mark: You're going to find out.

Jack: Six foot eight!

Mark: If you haven't been, it's worthwhile. And yeah, really nice social things. There's lots of parties and meals going on.

Jack: There's a big karaoke party the Thursday night, which is the night of the sixth you touched on earlier. And yeah, we'll be there. So tweet at us, come and say hello.

Mark: You might be doing karaoke.

Jack: I'm definitely going to be doing karaoke.

Mark: And I will definitely not be. What a team.

Jack: We've signed up me and a couple of other Candour guys to do karaoke. And Mark's just going to drink and watch and take the mickey out of us, I think is the plan, right? Film it for future appraisals and stuff.

Mark: I'm going to drink and know things.

Jack: Okay, good. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll make a fool of myself. Like I do on this show pretty much every week.

Mark: OK. I think that's everything we got time for. We'll be back in one week's time, which will be Monday the 4th of April. And I hope you have a lovely week, and I hope we do see you at BrightonSEO.

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