Analytics Workshops at Agencies

This year, I led several workshops at digital and media agencies. The scenario was usually similar: at some community data/analytics event (or more often at the afterparty), I'd connect with the team leader of their analytics department and we'd arrange a workshop aimed at helping their internal team level up. The goal was to share not only current technical know-how and best practices, but also how to demonstrate the value of digital analytics to clients and which measurement use cases deliver the greatest real-world impact.
I usually do these workshops for free. I believe it's healthy not to see everything through the lens of money - to simply enjoy sharing what I'm personally passionate about and helping others pursue a similar path. The few hours a workshop takes do cost me some time, but rather than agonize over pricing and approvals, I prefer not to deal with it at all.
My reward is mainly the genuine interest in digital analytics I see among the young people on these teams. Let's be honest, most of them are about ten years younger than me, already working in analytics at some level, and they sense there's plenty of room to grow. I want to help them get there.
There's a significant difference between being able to deploy GA4 via GTM and report last-click performance to a lead, and building a clear data model for all of a client's marketing and frontend data, bringing order to their data ecosystem, connecting it with their CRM, and stitching together the entire story from ad banner impression to customer acquisition. And beyond just reporting that data also activating it in communication. All while explaining it to the client in a way that gets everyone pulling in the same direction, with a clear strategy, goal, and delivery.
This year, I ran workshops at Ogilvy, at Publicis with Filip Stavárek's team, and at Fragile with Filip Vlasák's team. The topics we covered related to advanced digital analytics for larger clients.

Here are some of the topics we discussed:
👉 How and for which use cases to leverage BigQuery and server-side measurement in practice, and how to report session and event sources in BigQuery. Tip: we currently pull session sources from the params of the session_start event.
👉 Consent and cookieless tracking - how to build cookieless tracking in practice, what it looks like, and what kind of data it provides. Tip: for cookieless tracking today, we most commonly use the Stape Data Tag on the frontend, which elegantly creates an anonymous event from datalayer parameters (without setting any storage), sends it to sGTM, and writes it directly to BigQuery.
👉 Whether attribution can be applied to non-consented data (yes, it can) and how to do it using what's called an entrance event.
👉 How to build a marketing data warehouse in BigQuery not just for reporting, but also for data activation in media systems, personalization, email marketing, and more. Examples of feeding Google Ads from BigQuery via direct integration, along with client experiences.
Beyond the purely technical topics, we discussed which analytics use cases and services make sense, how to establish and sustain a quality analytics team within a large agency, and how to use analytics to deliver real value that clients are willing to pay for.
I'm rooting for all the teams I trained this year and I'm confident that what we covered will soon be put into practice!


























