Today we have selected Fernando Ideses to take his interview. He is the Founder & CEO of GAannotations.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
To be honest, we are very lucky. In Israel, the population is only 9M, and this is the main reason why the COVID-19 vaccination campaign has been so successful.
Also, the health care system is very organized and well-equipped. So there is prompt response and implementation of measures against large-scale national emergencies.
In terms of businesses, it will take time to recover, but right now, the feeling is that finally, everything is coming back to “normal”.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
I have been a project manager for over 10 years, with wide experience in creating web platforms and mobile applications. I’m the kind of person with a passion for solving problems and improving on existing solutions. So I look at something, a web platform, an app, or an online tool or program perhaps, and I study what may be wrong so I can improve it. The whole idea is to deliver something better and improved.
As far as Annotations are concerned, Google Analytics has been dragging on this pain for more than a decade and over 600 marketers requested this feature (me included) https://issuetracker.google.com/… so my team & I decided to take a stand and we created a chrome extension, to take care of all the annotation needs in Google Analytics. We believe we are doing ourselves and a lot of people a huge favor.
How does your company innovate?
I will ask you a question 😉 when you check your reports, how do you understand web traffic spikes or dips from the past? I mean what causes the changes and how do you note them?
With GAannotations, you and your team can include insights and observations automatically and directly to your reports, allowing everyone to map activities to results.
I will give you an example, this article, obviously will affect the traffic to my website, right? so GAannotations system will detect it’s a new press release and add an annotation to my reports automatically, so when I check them, I can understand what causes the spike and how such information can be useful to my business as well as the decisions I make in subsequent times.
Annotations for Google Analytics already existed in Universal Analytics (previous version of GA), but it was just a manual action and only from inside Google Analytics. We took this feature to the next level and we are glad it works great!
How does the Coronavirus pandemic affect your business, and how are you coping?
We launched the product in the middle of the pandemic and quarantine, obviously bad timing but who knows how long it will take? So we decided to launch anyway. We provided a global and remote solution and since the launch, we are getting great feedbacks and already have paid clients, so I think we are in the right direction.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
I followed the situation in Italy and Spain when Covid just started before it arrived in Israel, so I understood it was a bigger problem long before the country went into lockup and restrictions, so I prepare myself and the company at that time.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
We used tools before too, we manage the project with Trello and Slack.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
We have one competitor, but I think we are doing a good job staying ahead.
We are the only solution to add annotations to GA4 (latest Google Analytics version), we have many automated data sources like Weather Alerts, Holidays, Retail Marketing Dates, Google updates, WordPress updates, News Alerts, Website Blackouts.
We provide easy integrations via Zapier with almost any tool, like Slack, Asana, Trello, Google Ads, GitHub, Competitors Tweets, etc.
We plan to keep adding features and expand to other Analytics. Our interest is to make Google Analytics easy and comfortable to use for every user.
Your Final Thoughts
I think Covid-19 it’s a great example of how an external event can affect a business, for good or bad. So understanding your business and how you can handle new challenges is essential for its survival and success.
- Spokesperson: Fernando Ideses
- Company: GAannotations
- Website link: https://www.gaannotations.com/
