by Janus Boye
Robert Petkovic with a smartphone
“People tend to look at the wrong numbers and misinterpret the results”
Robert Petković is known to get to the point and in our conversation, he’s straight-talking as expected when we talk about his take on digital marketing in 2021 and his background as one of the first full-time digital analysts in Croatia.
Today, his role is higher level as Digital Analytics Director at Pro media group in Zagreb, Croatia, where he focuses on data storytelling, website analysis and optimising webshops for large corporates.
In his own words, he frequently draws on his psychology background to help understand human behaviour and from talking to Robert, it’s clear that we’ve come a long way in the past 25 years when it comes to website analytics, but we also still have a long way to go.
Robert is our expert of the month.
More than 25 years of understanding how people use the Web
When Robert went to university in the early 90’s, HTML was new and his first job was to create the very first website for the psychology department at the University of Rijeka.
This is when Robert started on his journey building websites and notably understanding how websites are used.
While attending university, Robert was also drummer, backup singer, guitar player of “Šajeta”, a well known Croatian band that is still active. They even had a #1 hit in 1995 called Moji koraki. Back then, he also created the band’s first webpage and they even put the URL on the CD cover making Šajeta officially the first Croatian band who put the band website URL on its cover.
Jokingly he says that he learned from psychology how to use Google Analytics, or similar tools before they were invented. As Robert says:
The tools show figures, charts, tables and graphs that tell us about human behaviour.
After his time at the university, he moved to a website agency, which he joined in the late 90’s. Initially as a web designer, but later he introduced the then-novel concept of web apps (database-driven websites) as a part of building the first content portal for Croatian Telecom.
He kept building websites for almost a decade and then in 2005, shifted his focus to making web projects more efficient, and in particular using analytics and understanding the numbers to turn websites into a sales machine.
Fast forward to 2021 and he’s now lectured on digital marketing for almost a decade with a speciality in really understanding the numbers.
Robert on stage in 2017 asking the rhetoric question: “You think Facebook would be so powerful if we weren’t willing to give them all our data?” Not really, right. They have it down to an art how to take action on data.
Going from numbers to taking action
In our conversation, Robert also drew on the importance of good maths teachers:
Unfortunately, too many didn’t like math in school, but if you actually explain what the numbers mean, then they can use the results and it becomes extremely valuable
Robert also made it quite clear, that analytics shouldn’t be left to the developers. He often talks about analytics at conferences and seminars and he says even today, many mistakenly think, that analytics is just a piece of code you put on your website. Yes, it is the developers’ job to make sure the appropriate data can be extracted, but that is actually the easy part and from a marketing perspective, the value is somewhere else. You need web analysts to think about the analytics, architecture it, construct and implement it.
He often finds himself as an interpreter between developers and marketing and he is hired to both to save time by getting to right actions faster and also to do it cheaper than some other agencies who charge steeply for this valuable part of the modern marketing equation.
What’s the value of your content?
According to Robert, there’s one metric in Google Analytics that often gets forgotten:
Page Value
As Robert said:
In performance marketing that’s the only piece of data that can give you useful information on how much your content is in charge of website conversion. Instead people usually use metrics such as “Bounce Rate” or “Time on Page” to evaluate the value of their website content, not knowing there’s a metric made just for that.
Whether the content is your blog post, product page, company values page or really any of the content you have on your website, Robert emphasises the key to knowing the actual value of each content asset.
The devil is in the details as they say, and in Google Analytics that metric has a value of zero (0.00) by default. When Robert consults content creators, he usually works on tweaking that metric to get some useful information.
Learn more about Robert Petković
Robert naturally has his own website on ropetko.com, which has good content in both Croatian and English. On the English site, you’ll find some helpful posts like these:
Finally, you can also meet Robert in person at the Web Summer Camp in Croatia in early September.