Hey Reader!
I've had a bit of writer's block lately. Or maybe it's less writer's block and more "I want to go outside" block.
I typically write in the evenings or on Friday mornings, and frankly the weather has been far too nice to sit down at the computer and crank out posts about analytics. Every time I've opened a draft this month, whatever is happening outside the window has been far more interesting.
There's no life lesson here. No tidy connection back to analytics, no "and this is why rest makes you a better practitioner." I'm enjoying some time outside and I hope you can too. Summer is short.
Before You Fire Your Ads Agency for AI, Read This
Heard about the hot new trend where you fire your ads agency, replace them with AI, and pocket the difference? Brittany wrote a post about it and her argument is that the AI isn't the thing doing the work, the person operating it is, and what you lose without that person aren’t the obvious failures. Instead, you have a situation where you burn budget with just enough results for weeks before anyone notices.
Read this →
Articles Worth Your Time
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Stape's Shopify app can now map your product fields for you
Dan Murovtsev posted about an update to Stape's Shopify app: you can pick exactly what populates item_id, item_sku, item_brand and item_category, and concatenate fields on the fly to build strings like PREFIX_{market}{product_id}{variant_id}. If you've ever spent time building custom JS variables in GTM purely to get Shopify's variant IDs to line up with your Meta catalogue or Merchant Center feed (which I certainly have done!), you can now get that time back.
What local brand actually means to Google and AI
Cyrus Shepard joined Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal on Near Media to talk about brand the way Google and AI systems model it, as a database entity assembled from your site, your business profile, and what third parties say about you. His four pillars are distinctiveness, relevance, reputation and demand, and a lot of the tactical advice lands on things we were all told stopped mattering a decade ago, like NAP consistency.
Build your own GTM monitoring system on GCP
This is a full walkthrough for tag monitoring you host yourself. It uses GTM's addEventCallback API logging to record every tag fire in BigQuery, with Terraform and Dataform handling the infrastructure and transformation, and Cloud Monitoring alerting you when event volumes drop or parameters go missing. Running cost sits around $18 to $25 a month, against the $200 to $1,000 that commercial monitoring tools charge. The post says you can build it in half an hour but that’s generous. I do recommend setting it up if you already have GCP and you don’t want to miss an event disappearing from your analytics or ad platforms.
Where You Can Find Me
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MeasureSummit
October 7–8, 2026 | Virtual | Free to attend live
I'll be speaking! The full lineup gets announced in September, but the livestream is free, so you can get it on your calendar now.
That's it for this edition of The Huddle. As always, if you have questions or want to share what you're working on (or what you’re doing this summer!), just hit reply!