SearchFest 2014 Mini-Interview: Tim Resnik

Tim Resnik will be speaking on the “Website Analytics” panel at SearchFest 2014 which will take place on February 28th, 2014 in Portland, Oregon. For more information and to purchase tickets, please click here.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I am the product strategy principal at Moz where I help define long-term product roadmaps and manage a small team of analyst and product marketers.

Here’s my bio: https://moz.com/about/team/tim-resnik

2) What are some of the shortcomings in Google Analytics that Moz Analytics is trying to address?

Google Analytics is very good at telling you information about where your visitors are coming from and what those visitors are doing on your site once they arrive. Moz Analytics isn’t about addressing shortcomings in Google Analytics, rather instead of providing marketers with information about on-site activity, it is 1) providing information about how your site/brand and your competitors’ sites/brands are performing across various inbound channels, such as search and social, and 2) providing recommendations on optimizing your site for search.

3) In my PPC experience, I’ve seen so many suboptimal analytics implementations…some so bad that I ultimately couldn’t trust the data. How can the challenge of implementation be overcome so that data integrity is preserved?

I think being skeptical of the data, no matter the source, is a good practice. I never rely on a single source of data and always cross-validate my assumptions. When first working with a site my approach is to gain a general view of key performance metrics by looking at web analytics (usually Google), Google and Bing webmaster tools, rankings data and third-party crawl software such as Moz or Screaming Frog. I then build a list of assumptions from this data and validate through the one pure source traffic data: server logs.