The story behind Measurementplan

First some background

January 2024 marked my two years as a freelance digital analyst. It's undeniably the best choice I've ever made. I've been lucky to cherry-pick clients, chose my own salary and how much I want to work (or not work). Experimented with a four-day workweek, been on extra long vacations, working remotely, you name it. I can definitely see myself as being a freelancer until retirement. 🏖️

But I haven't felt excited and challenged for sometime and wanted to change that. A few months back I was having fika with a friend and he just told me straight: "you should build a product". This encouragement gave me a much needed confidence boost (thank you Johan). ⚡

That week or same afternoon I was setting up Google Analytics for a small website, thinking how I would structure the project. The clients team consisted of two software developers and the founder. They were keen to understand more about usual questions like:

1) Where do the users come from?
2) How do they interact with the site?
3) Best practices for adding Google Ads and Meta Ads pixels

When it comes to measurement plans or data layer instructions, I've realized most people in our industry share a common approach. A Google Docs with a left side navigation (table of contents) listing each event, a screenshot of the feature or page, the data layer instructions and event parameters in a table.

Scratching my own itch

As I started to navigate the client website, taking mental notes on what to track, taking screenshots, copy and pasting to my Google Docs. I realized this take a lot of time and effort. And only one day later the documentation were outdated since the devs had changed the flows and frontend components. I felt really irritated and annoyed that I had to redo all the work over again. A recurring problem worth solving. 🔁

I've been working with Digital Analytics for soon over a decade. To me it's a really exciting industry, constantly changing and evolving with a great supportive community. I'd love to give something back, saving time and headaches for me and my peers.

Coming up with a project name. I just searched if the domain measurementplan.com was available (which it was) and it truly felt like a sign from above. More important though, how might I validate the idea? 💡

Validating the idea

My first experiment, I spent maybe 1 hour creating and posting 10 (quite crappy) AI-generated posts targeting the keyword "measurementplans". In just a few days it generated over 1000 impressions.

Second, I invited some industry friends for lunch and pitched the idea. But I quickly realized they were biased since they wouldn't want to demotivate me. They would just cheer me on.

The third experiment (best one), I decided to run a workshop on Measurecamp Stockholm where I held a discussion forum about the subject: "How might we improve Measurement Plans as an industry". I didn't expect many attendees since I picked the same time slot as Simo Ahava (Bruce Lee of digital analytics). But the room were filled with people. From these discussions I learned that the attendees also experienced documentation as an important task. They also found measurementplans as frustrating, confusing and unreliable most of the times. Especially when multiple agencies are involved, during onboarding and handovers.

Building a minimum viable product

After spending multiple hours prototyping in Figma I decided to outsource both design and development. Reached out to Frilansare Sverige (a Swedish slack community for freelancers) where I found a fullstack developer. Very excited since it's the first time I build a product from scratch (and run a newsletter). I'm really looking forward to share more as we progress.

Feel free to follow the project on Linkedin.  Until next time! 👋