For our November 2024 event, we brought Josh Silverbauer in from Philly to talk about behavior analytics (in the form of MS Clarity) and marketing analytics (in the form of Piwik PRO) and when you might want to use each one.

Since Josh is well-known for writing parody songs to introduce speakers, here at CBUSDAW we flipped the script on him and opened the event with a surprise parody song about Josh.

We present “It’s Josh Silverbauer” to the tune of “In the Midnight Hour” by Wilson Pickett, sung by Jim Gianoglio and featuring Jason Packer on kazoo.

While Josh is a fan of both Clarity and Piwik PRO, he’s pointed out that he’s not paid anything by either organization… so he’s free to tell it like it is. And “how it is” is that both tools are great additions to any analyst’s arsenal — and with a generous free tier for Piwik PRO and a totally free product with Clarity there’s not much barrier to entry.

Josh pointed out how the two tools can easily used to supplement each other. For example, one could use Piwik PRO to find a particular aggregate group of users that aren’t converting well, and then review those users’ entire sessions with the session recording feature in Clarity. Or check the heatmap of the landing page for that same group.

If you’ve used session recording tools in the past you know that it can be pretty tedious to watch the recordings one-by-one. It’s like, “geez, just click the button already user #23341, it’s RIGHT THERE”.

Microsoft has recently integrated CoPilot into Clarity so it can now help save you from watching a ton of videos and instead can summarize and do some basic analysis for you.

Josh described Piwik PRO as “what Google’s Universal Analytics 2.0 could have been if GA4 didn’t exist”. If you were a serious user of our dearly departed UA you’ll feel right at home in Piwik PRO, and you’ll be pleased to see how well thought-out the platform is.

Josh’s slides:

Ok, so Clarity and Piwik PRO are both pretty cool tools, but what about rock operas?

Josh (and Jason) are releasing Volume 2 of Josh’s epic analytics rock opera entitled “User Journey Volume 2: The Custom Dimension” on November 18th.

You can listen to the first volume, “Universal Sunset” now on Spotify and most other streaming platforms.

Finally, don’t forget to join us next month for our yearly holiday event at the Grandview Theater. No speakers, but there will be a movie this year and you can vote on what you’d like it to be!

Disclaimer: Piwik PRO is a sponsor of CBUSDAW — but they only pay for the monthly pizza, not our (or Josh’s) endorsements.