Nudge began as a content marketing analytics startup after being spun out of a New Zealand-based agency in 2013.
Founder and CEO Ben Young moved to New York shortly thereafter to launch Nudge as a standalone business.
But as time went by, customers began using the company’s pixel and analytics for more than content marketing, says Young, speaking on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
And, soon, Nudge simply became an advertising analytics company, growing into a full-fledged analytics provider over the past five years.
There’s been an opportunity for independent analytics business to find a place in the market. Google Analytics trained the marketing and digital media world to expect site and ad analytics for free. But the recent migration to Google’s new analytics suite, GA4, has been a mess.
And while GA4 is still free to the masses, Young says there’s an opportunity now to provide easier and more intuitive analytics because even many longtime users don’t understand how to work GA4.
Google had to make a big change with GA4 since the old Google Analytics system was built on cookie data and IP addresses. GA4, meanwhile, was created for post-cookie analytics and won’t log IP addresses.
But it was also commonplace for publishers and marketers to abuse the analytics, with pixels attached to things like CDNs (servers that cache and broadcast content in local areas) that should not have been firing off Google Analytics event tags. People were also tracked by device IDs and IP addresses that were meant for core app and site management, not packaging ad audiences.
The changes to GA4 mean companies are looking for analytics solutions right now that bring back some of the lost visibility or functions that GA4 won’t keep (namely, cross-site, user-level tracking).
“We’re trying to make analytics fun again,” Young says.
Also in this episode: How Young got involved in the nascent American pro rugby league and how his media startup experience helps when it comes to developing the league and the New York team (Go Ironworkers!), making the transition from New Zealand to New York City and whether TikTok will prove the doubters (us) wrong again.
