So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on CloudFlare. We walk through what CloudFlare is, the features, and why marketers should care about it. Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- What is CloudFlare
- Why you should care about CloudFlare
- Which cloudflare features matter most to marketers
Upcoming Episodes:
- TBD
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Christopher Penn 0:15
Hello, right?
John Wall 0:18
We are here I know without Katie to wrangle the cats, it’s amazing that we were able to
Christopher Penn 0:22
get equity.
Well, she’s off getting chased by like rabid squirrels in the woods.
John Wall 0:27
Fighting bear in the rain, I would imagine.
So.
Yeah.
So we’re here today, though covering our topic.
We’re talking about Cloudflare.
So I’ve got a bunch of questions we can serve up to you about that.
But this is, so what the Trust Insights podcast, you can check us out over at Trust Insights, AI, we’re always talking about what’s happening.
And the biggest thing is getting in a little bit deeper talking about you know, so what, why does this stuff matter? And so with that, yeah, what is Cloudflare? Tell us about Cloudflare?
Christopher Penn 0:54
Well, let’s take a step back.
So as marketers, particularly as marketing technologists, one of the things that we’ve got to do is constantly try to make our marketing tech like our websites function better.
There have been companies and technologies for a while they’ve done things to actually accelerate your website and reverse caching and proxying.
And stuff like that, that essentially have, if you imagine your website is is sort of at the bottom layer, and then there’s a customer browsing the web at the top, for them to directly connect to your website can be, you know, 15, or 16, jumps across the internet, the way the internet works, to get to your website, there are companies Cloudflare is example one, aka mile is another alchemize tech GriefShare, a client of Trust Insights, which is slightly awkward.
These companies are called content delivery networks and that essentially sit between your website and the customer make essentially make a copy of a lot of your stuff.
And then because they have datacenters, all around the world, when a customer goes to your website, they actually go to their nearest data center, and they see that version instead of what’s actually on your website.
So instead of going 15 or 16 jumps, the intimidates maybe three or four, so they get much faster, better experience.
Now, companies like akoma, and Cloudflare.
And stuff, what they do is they also provide a lot of additional services.
So they do it’s essentially called DNS interception.
DNS stands for Domain Name System, and it turns a URL like trust insights.ai, into a numeric address.
And that numeric address is our physical server with a service like Cloudflare.
What it does is it says, hey, when an inquiry for trust, insights.ai comes in, I’m going to, I have permission to intercept it.
And instead of going to the Trust Insights server, I’m going to take it to my data center and serve the customer our copy of the site.
So that means that they can block things like hostile bots, known bots that are just trying to inject spam traffic into your your website or looking for backdoors.
And really obvious security precautions that for a lot of businesses, they are not equipped to handle.
So like for example, my martial arts teacher, his website, he’s a sole proprietor, he’s an amazing, wonderful, outstanding martial arts teacher, he is not a marketing technologist.
And he is not gonna be admitting his server anytime soon.
So for, for someone like him having a service like CloudFlare, that intercepts a lot of that crap is a huge win for him.
John Wall 3:36
Yeah, and so I get that there’s that idea that you’ve got your website.
And normally, if it was on one server, just all the traffic would be pouring to that one server.
And if it was traffic, say, from Singapore, and it has to come all the way to Dallas, that’s a huge jump.
So you get something like CloudFlare, where you’re the Singapore query goes, maybe even just to Singapore and gets the copy of your site, and it comes back.
But how about talking about the bad actors? You know, what are some other security things that didn’t get taken care of that is are there other, you know, additional is, is this basically a firewall?
Christopher Penn 4:11
Kind of it kind of is.
The other reason I think we should probably give some context about is why we’re talking about this at all.
We were processing Scott Brinker is Martic 9000.
Now, the list of the top marketing technologies used the top market basket marketing technology companies and in this analysis, what marketing technology companies use when you look at the top services, obviously, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are at the head of the list.
There’s WordPress, Salesforce and Facebook ads.
And then there’s Cloudflare.
It is one of the most popular technologies for technology companies themselves big or small for managing this, the complexity of essentially being on the internet these days and having highly available websites.
So yeah, it is a bit like a firewall, it is a lot like a reverse proxy or a caching server, which are, again, those are cost sites, tools that make copies your website and put copies closer to your customers.
John Wall 5:16
Yeah.
And then so, as far as you know, what marketers are looking for, like, which of these features, you know, obviously, the site speed and getting closer are huge things.
But what else is there other stuff that you can take advantage of with this,
Christopher Penn 5:29
there’s a ton of stuff.
So let’s actually dig into what what is inside of Cloudflare.
And this, obviously, as huge tree of things.
Genuinely speaking, for marketing purposes, we want to fast site, we want to secure site.
And we want to make it easier for other marketing technologies to interact with us.
So we’ll start real simple.
In here with let’s start with security.
If you want, you can create all kinds of rules to help the administration of your site, for example, you can block certain if you know, there’s like hostile traffic from known sources, or you want to set up security tunnels so that you can admin, you know, the raw servers themselves, you can do all that in the security section.
There’s not a ton in here for marketers, but one of the things that I think is an important caution.
Marketing, probably should not be administering CloudFlare, this is probably best done by your IT department in collaboration with you as to for any of these technologies.
John Wall 6:31
Yeah, this is totally web admin, you know, realm.
Christopher Penn 6:36
Exactly.
With access, you know, same thing you control, who gets access to your site, where we start getting into the marketing stuff is in the the speed section, right.
So if you want, you can pay to have your images compressed.
Cloudflare is free.
But obviously, for some of the good stuff, you do want to may pay for the upgrades, reducing and compressing some of the source code like JavaScript, CSS and HTML, that’s a an easy win.
If you go to something like Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, it will tell you like, hey, you’ve got a lot of really overweight JavaScript code on your site, maybe you should consider compressing it.
And a service like Cloudflare does that same for compression.
This is new here.
This is called early hints that allows browsers to download components faster.
So if you had a trust insights.ai On that page, it’s like 300, different things.
There’s images, there’s text, there’s scripts, there’s all sorts of stuff.
And modern web browsers are capable of downloading stuff out of order, and then sort of reassembling it, which is kind of nice.
But you want to be able to, you want to make sure to turn that on.
So that again, for the end user, that it feels snappy, like it feels like it’s coming together fast.
If you look in Google Search Console, which is, by the way, we have a paid course for that, I should probably find that banner link for the Search Console course.
One of the things that Search Console looks at is stuff like first Contentful paint, it’s part of what’s called the core web vitals.
And that means how long does it take between someone typing in your site’s URL, and the first thing they see, when you turn on stuff like optimized delivery, like really hence, it helps make that faster, which improves your core web titles.
Because Google doesn’t have special access to your web server, Google crawls your website, the same way that a user does.
So they will interact with Cloudflare instead of directly with the web service.
So if you have stuff like this turned on, now you’re making your site more appealing to Googlebot.
And then that can improve your core web vitals, which improves your your search rankings.
Alright, let’s keep digging down here.
Again, there’s a lot of optimizations of some things like improving paint time with rocket loader.
Again, this is where you’re gonna want to collaborate with it, and probably your web designer, some of these settings, if you don’t know what they do, they can break your website.
So it’s good to know those what things do and don’t work.
So there’s a lot to be had there in optimization, there’s a lot of stuff in caching.
So again, caching is when you make a copy Cloudflare makes copies of your website all around the internet.
And then it stores that and then when you say put up a new blog post, if you’ve got the integration setup, the first time somebody tries to access that post Cloudflare will retrieve it and distribute copies to all the data centers and then every subsequent request will be served up from the copy until it expires.
So there’s generally speaking, there is no reason not to to turn on caching, just crank that knob all the way up.
This one is new crawler hints.
This is is super important for SEO.
This essentially helps Googlebot know what to crawl on your website and how often to come back.
For small websites like the Trust Insights website, it’s not a big deal, right? We don’t have probably more than 10,000 pages on our site.
So Googlebot can chew through it pretty quickly.
If you’re a big site, like Amazon, or eBay, or something like that, you know, or even just a large corporate site, that you may have 100,000 pages.
So one of the things that can reduce your perceived value by Google is when Googlebot gets lost in your website, because it has a certain amount of time, it’s going to spend crawling pages before it has to move on to the next website.
And it’s cute.
So something like crawler hints says, Hey, here’s only what’s changed, right? Here’s what’s new.
And so it can make your crawling super, super efficient, which in turn means that Googlebot sees more of your website, it can correctly rank those pages, index those pages.
And, again, it’s one of the things you want to turn on.
And the other one is they’re always on service.
So if your website goes down, for some reason, it can serve up limited copies to a user like a cached copy in case while you fix things which we’ve had to do.
Christopher Penn 11:13
To make repairs, that one’s very, very helpful.
Another thing let’s see in the network settings, now, again, this is it territory.
But pretty much most of the checkboxes in this section are things you’ll want to turn on.
Because these enable multiple, multiple features that are important to like, are using the HTTP two protocol, are you using the HTTP three protocol CloudFlare, even if your web server doesn’t do these things, because maybe you bought like some really cheap hosting Cloudflare can speed that up.
Okay, another couple things with the security section, you can do things like check the security level of your site.
And you can enforce with encryption, you can enforce saying, like, always use HTTPS.
So even on pages that, you know, might not be secure, you can have CloudFlare, essentially serve them up as secure pages.
And again, HTTPS usage is one of those things that Google looks for in Search Console.
So if you are, if you got stuff that’s not secure, this will help lock it down and again, make you appear more favorable in Google’s eyes.
The last section, I think, is very interesting, which is brand new, is something called a Zara’s.
This is a new thing that they’ve got going, where you can start to have certain types of code run on Cloudflare platform stead of putting them on your website, essentially, this is like a cloud based version of Tag Manager, which is really interesting.
It’s an interesting play.
But this would be appropriate for if you have a site, where you have a custom domain name for it, you know, like, your your headphone site, but maybe it goes to a site that you don’t have access to the back end code.
And you can’t you and there’s no access to Tag Manager, you could effectively create a tag manager like layer on that custom URL, and still be able to run Google Analytics, even if it’s not a site you own, as long as you have as long as the domain name is something that is is part of it.
So I thought that was a very interesting, relatively new addition to it.
So that’s what in a nutshell, Cloudflare offers to marketers.
It’s this, the key things are, make your site faster, make it more compliant with what services like Google especially are looking for, make it a lot more secure, and make things just run better.
John Wall 13:53
Yeah, that’s interesting to the CIO and the GA tool there and the GA four tool, is that actually going to set up Tag Manager in the cloud?
Christopher Penn 14:02
No, it doesn’t have Tag Manager just sets up your juku allows for tracking pixel.
John Wall 14:06
Okay, the tracking pixel gets laid there as opposed to code.
Christopher Penn 14:11
Exactly.
No, yeah, here’s the SSL stuff, as was mentioned earlier, so you can say force always use HTTPS, and a bunch of other things.
One of the thing that’s interesting is you do get some level of analytics through Cloudflare.
And I think that’s kind of interesting.
You can see requests, bandwidth Unique Visitors.
Be careful with this, who you let see this data.
Because these numbers will be wildly different than what is in your Google Analytics.
And part of the reason for that is that this counts everything, including all the crap, the bots, the spammers, etc.
If you want to see essentially, what the raw usage of your website is, like, this is what it looks like.
So Trust Insights has had terms of raw trackable visitors 71,000 visitors in the Last 30 days, Google Analytics has about a quarter of that.
And when you look at, especially in the security section in terms of, you know, total threats, and then you know, performance and stuff like that, a lot of that traffic is not necessarily good traffic, it’s, you know, a lot of it is see appears to be spammy bots.
So I suppose if you wanted to overstate.
You could use this data, but it’s not going to match up even close to what’s in Google Analytics.
John Wall 15:33
Yeah, that’s kind of crazy how it’s that far out.
But I know that is, when you’re doing server level tracking, you just get so much more junk and other crawlers and things like that, that the numbers get out of hand.
Christopher Penn 15:46
Exactly.
Another new thing they have is being able to do a little bit of email routing.
So it’s like, effectively if you have a domain, but you need to set up aliases.
And you can’t do that in your email system.
I’m not sure why it would be the case.
Maybe bought like super cheap hosting, you can create email aliases, you know, like marketing at TrustInsights.ai dot AI and have Cloudflare essentially reroute that mail to a different preferred mailbox.
I think it’s kind of a neat idea.
Certainly, certainly something that makes sense from a DNS perspective.
But I would also argue, if you’re having to resort to things like this, you probably just need to upgrade your email hosting.
John Wall 16:23
Yeah, well, that could be really weird too.
Because if you start making changes there, especially if you haven’t looped it in, and there could be weird things going on with, you know, having multiple layers of email admin that could get really ugly.
Christopher Penn 16:36
Yeah, definitely.
The last section, of course, is the probably the most complex, which is what Cloudflare originally started doing was just DNS management.
So managing your domain name records.
This is a section where, again, you need technical expertise.
This is this is not the section to go playing around with because you can accidentally just remove your site from the internet if you do things wrong, or you just keep everyone from getting their email.
However, this is also where you do a lot of advanced configuration for your site.
So if you do email marketing, and you’re using system like Pardot, or Hubspot, or Marketo or whatever, when you first do your onboarding, a lot of the time people will talk about in the in the onboarding like oh, you need to update your DNS records to allow Hubspot, for example, to be an authorized sender of trust insights.ai.
Otherwise, if it’s not when you send out an email from Hubspot because Hubspot doesn’t have authorization to use our domain, it could be coming from J wallet Trust Insights an AI would be coming from Hubspot IP and a lot of email servers to be like, This doesn’t look right.
This looks spammy.
Yeah, exactly.
You’re trying to spoof it, you would would essentially authenticate and say yes, these Hubspot servers are permitted to send on behalf of trust insights.ai.
And that’s what you do here.
So a lot, you’ll hear terms like SPF, a de Kim and demark protocols in email marketing.
That’s what’s managed in here in the DNS so that we are who we say we are on all of our different systems.
Or it’s talking to a friend the other day, who’s saying their her email open rates, when she changed providers went from 38% to 10%.
I said, Did you update your DNS records for the new provider? She said, What’s a DNS record? I said, that’s your problem.
Your new provider basically is being seen as a spammer.
John Wall 18:36
Yeah, yeah.
And you can lose a whole chunk of your list.
Now that’s like, horrible if you can get if you get wiped out like that.
Now, during the configuration, do you actually go in and just set up all your domains? And that’s how this gets access to the DNS for for them? Or how does that all work?
Christopher Penn 18:52
Exactly.
So you would show next example, here, if I would, if I had to put it in marketing over coffee here, which by the way, we need to move on to Cloudflare.
It’s not currently.
I’m gonna choose the free version here.
It will scan for your existing DNS records, and it’ll import everything as much as possible.
And then from there, you would go and change the name servers for marketing over coffee, wherever it is that you own.
I think it’s on GoDaddy and say, point this to Cloudflare instead,
John Wall 19:25
right? Okay.
So Cloudflare does is the the first name server,
Christopher Penn 19:29
right? So for example, this is pulling in these records.
Already, I can tell there’s an issue.
And so we’ll we’ll want to, you know, obviously make those changes in GoDaddy at some point.
But the big issue is, there’s no email records provisioned for authentication.
So every time you send out the marketing over coffee newsletter, from whatever service you’re sending it from that service is being seen as a spammer.
John Wall 19:56
Right.
Well, so this is, this is interesting because we can talk about this because we’ve never kicked this off.
out.
But I’ve always been using the am show.com as the sending address because I wanted to, I knew I would be doing a lot of screwy stuff with email and I didn’t want marketing over coffee.com to take the hit in case I screwed something up.
But what do you think is that the the right way to go? Because I had seen that done at a bunch of companies I’ve worked at to a lot of them have places that I’ve been, actually have a different email domain for the email just again, so that if somebody does something really stupid with email, you’re not taking down the company’s, you know, main site.
Christopher Penn 20:32
Yeah, that’s a general best practice, especially for a larger company, where you would want to have at the very least, an email subdomain, you know, something like marketing dot trust insights.ai As your as your email domain, you don’t have to keep it as a separate domain, it’s probably better.
If you don’t, it’s probably better if it’s all under one roof.
But for smaller businesses, you know, like a one person show like marketing over coffee, it for sure makes sense.
Just do everything in the same place.
Because the more legitimate email you send out, you know, just in the course of business, the better your email reputation overall, is.
John Wall 21:10
Alright, I’ll give it another couple of months since I just changed providers, I’ll let all the crummy addresses work themselves out of the mix for a few weeks and then make the transition?
Christopher Penn 21:19
Oh, no, I’d actually so for like, we just moved to ghost.
So putting in those records, the MX records for Ghost, is it essential thing to do before you hit the send button? Because if you if you don’t, it’s gonna be really bad.
John Wall 21:34
Yeah, right.
We know if we were sending from an moc address that would Yeah, that’d be end up in block city.
Christopher Penn 21:39
Yep, exactly.
So that’s, that’s how this stuff works is, it’s very much heavy AI, heavy, it stuff behind the scenes to to connect all the pipes.
And that’s what essentially what you’re doing is just connecting all these different pipes into a place where you can make all this stuff work.
John Wall 22:00
Now, how about so you’re showing all the admin over here like this is getting the accounts up and running? What about as far as you know, adding it to your CMS or your website or your servers? Like, how much work is that and what kind of work is that, depending on the platform?
Christopher Penn 22:13
It depends on the platform.
So for example, Cloudflare can work in front of any kind of web server, and they you don’t really need to put anything on the server itself for it to work.
There are plugins like it has a plugin for WordPress, so that when you publish a new post on WordPress, it automatically gets an update for its service.
So it works a little bit better, a little bit faster.
But one of the things that’s nice about this kind of software is that you don’t actually need it to integrate with a server in order for it to work well.
Which is good, because if the server goes away, then this can go can still continue to function for a little while.
John Wall 22:47
Yeah, right, you can still have cached results show up.
So it’s sort of like your, you know, maybe your ecommerce is broken, but at least like people can still read about the company, it doesn’t look like you’re dead in the water.
Christopher Penn 22:57
Exactly.
Exactly.
So that’s, you know, I would say you need some kind of caching solution these days, it doesn’t have to be Cloudflare.
Like I said, there’s a bunch of companies that do this stuff, optimize another one that’s very popular, aka my tends to be on the higher end, the more enterprise side for like marketing over coffee, you definitely would not use Aqua mail for same for my martial arts teacher would just be, you know, sandblasting a soup cracker.
But for big companies, it’s, you know, occupies the better solution.
John Wall 23:26
Yeah.
And I have not, you know, had to research or buy any of this and years and years, but isn’t Akamine like, if you’re hosting video, or you have a huge, heavy bandwidth stuff people tend to would go to Akamai, is that still the case? Or is it not a big deal anymore, as YouTube just made, all those things go away?
Christopher Penn 23:45
YouTube has made some of it, we’ve done it for a lot of companies, but they’re there.
All these companies now have the ability to cache media, just to store media and forwarded that it just depends on the size of the data centers.
And like we were seeing with the Bartek 9000, it’s a it’s one of the biggest CDN.
There’s Cloudflare there’s aka my there’s MaxCDN friend of mine, who else is big in the mix, but there’s there’s a bunch of companies that all have those content networks, where instead of having to serve about one gigabyte video file over and over and over again, it’s essentially just lets people get a copy of the data stream.
John Wall 24:27
That makes sense.
I don’t know is that other stuff that users need to know about when they’re walking through the admin or doing setup or is it kind of you know, more of a set it and forget it thing?
Christopher Penn 24:36
It’s, it’s definitely not set it and forget it is one of those things that should be on your maintenance list, you know, once a month, go in and look at it make sure that everything’s working the way it’s supposed to and you know, maybe there’s new features that you might want to turn on like, you know, the color budget stuff was something that’s relatively new or is in beta i It’s definitely not something to be said if you get and it’s I get it.
It’s one of those things where you have to collaborate with it.
Because otherwise, they may do something at some point, you know, for example, a change your name servers on your domain that pointed away from Cloudflare.
And then all the work you did setting up is is meaningless because you know, the traffic’s not going there anymore.
Yeah, cuz
John Wall 25:18
it doesn’t come through.
No, that makes sense.
And I know I do get, you can set up monthly reporting, like, I get an email that just says, like, hey, X amount of bandwidth was, you know, your servers didn’t have to serve up.
And so for people that don’t know, do that’s, I mean, for most hosting, you pay for the bandwidth.
So if you’re able to shut it off, and especially if it’s stuff that’s highly repetitive, like video files, or whatever, I mean, you can significantly reduce your hosting costs on a monthly basis by having something’s a cheaper source serve this up, not only is it faster, it ends up being cheaper.
Christopher Penn 25:50
Yeah, the bot rejection is also really important, too.
Because you’ve had sites who have gotten hit by bots and knows right up your bill.
John Wall 25:59
Yeah, no, that’s I even never got to the bottom of the well, with that with the marketing over coffee site, there was some rogue podcasting tool from some, I don’t even know where it came from, I do have one suspicion that I can’t, you know, throw under the bus.
But yeah, if you’re getting like 5000 hits a day, from some server, it ended up being like, you know, an extra 200 bucks a month that I had to pull the plug on the domain.
And actually, it because even blocking it at the, at the DNS level, it was still 1000s of hits.
And so, you know, we’re still getting charged for it.
So that’s one of those classic things to where, you know, none of the companies involved really care too much about fixing it, because everybody’s getting paid on it.
So it’s, but yeah, this is critical for that too.
And well in denial of service, right? This is always like the stock solution that people talked about for denial of service is like, No, you need to be using a service like this.
So if you ever under attack, they can you know, they already know who the bad actors are.
And what isn’t there even dynamic response to that.
Like, won’t it say, oh, wait a minute, if you’re getting like 100 times what you normally get in the day, we need to start doing something.
Christopher Penn 27:10
Yeah.
So you’ll get alerts.
And then also there’s the this whole switch here it says under attack.
hit the panic button.
Raise shields.
Exactly.
And so what happens with that is that everyone who visits your website gets greeted with a CAPTCHA first, and then they have to fill out the CAPTCHA before they can access your website.
So it’s obviously not something you want to leave turned on.
But if you know you’re just getting stormed, you just you know, put the shields up.
And you know, and buckle down.
John Wall 27:36
Yeah.
Right.
Because if you’re in that place where everybody’s timing out, like they’re getting absolutely nothing.
Yeah, I can see that can save the day for you.
Christopher Penn 27:45
Exactly.
The one other thing that I think is important to mention is that it’s not a cure for a poorly setup web server.
So if your company has a web servers and aliens in it, that is not super great.
This will like plaster over many sins.
But the underlying it is things are still things you need to fix is a it’s not going to make it’s it’s lipstick on a pig.
It’s not going to make the pig any look any better at his cart.
John Wall 28:16
Yeah, I mean, what kind of mistakes would people make that would fall into that? Because obviously, it’s replicating whatever you’ve got.
So if you’re doing something wrong, it’s you know, replicating, it doesn’t solve anything.
But what kind of mistakes do you see people usually making,
Christopher Penn 28:30
the biggest one is least with like, the Apache web server is setting up the wrong kind of multi threading, which means that your server can only handle a certain number of people, you know, knocking on the door, and then it crashes.
This is a problem that I’ve actually had with regular.
It’s just like, you know, a Linux box that I’ve commissioned, and I configured it wrong.
I set the wrong kind of multithreading.
And it, it turned out it, it ran out of an image just shut down.
And I get a little notification from Linode saying, Hey, your server is like 300% of CPU capacity.
And that’s the kind of things is for if you have web servers and web servers in particular, but also email service where maybe it isn’t the best at what they do.
This will definitely take the load off, but it will not stop the the underlying problem, which is you have a badly configured server.
And that’s something that again, that’s that it’s one of those things, it’s really challenging.
It impacts marketing, but it’s not marketing’s responsibility.
And yet, we have to find a way to work with it.
So that we get what we need as marketers and and deliver good customer experiences, even though it’s not something it’s under our control.
John Wall 29:51
Yeah, yeah, I see where you’re coming from now, because it’s a matter of, you’re just delaying that problem.
Like you could set it up and having cash Shooting will delay that.
But eventually you’re still gonna hit that ceiling and then you’re you’re dead in the water.
Christopher Penn 30:04
Exactly, you know, and it’s one of those things like, your average market is not going to go to it and say, Hey, are we using FPM or FastCGI? On our Apache server? Right? That’s probably not a question is going to happen all that often?
John Wall 30:15
Yeah, no, this is again, the argument for you should be burying beer on Friday to the IT department and keeping them happy.
So they take your calls when things get weird.
Christopher Penn 30:25
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, like, my background is in it.
I was in it first before I was in marketing.
So I know a lot of the technical underpinnings of this stuff.
And that’s a you know, I know to ask those questions.
A lot of folks are not, don’t have that that same experience.
John Wall 30:40
Yeah, no, it’s totally, you know, CMS is about as deep as you go.
You’re just expecting those servers to work all the time.
Christopher Penn 30:46
Exactly, exactly.
So that’s, again, I think every single website that handles more than like, one visitor needs some kind of intermediary, whether it’s CloudFlare, or back CDN, or Akamai or whoever, you need something that provides that level of security that provides that speed increase and provides services like Google, with optimized versions of your site, so that you’re, you’re painted in the best light to them.
And if you don’t have those things, again, Cloudflare has a free plan.
And it’s what we run, it’s, it’s good enough, we might upgrade one of these days, because some of the things like the image compression is something I want to play with.
I noticed that our most recent Search Console reports that are were a couple of our pages are getting flagged for large images.
So I want to see if I turned that on, then I don’t have to redo all the images on the Trust Insights website.
John Wall 31:40
Yeah, no, that’s, you know, and having to run reports figure out where all the big graphics are no icons.
And with Google, you know, mobile first and Search Console, you know, nicking you when you don’t have the right size graphics? Yeah, no, that’s quick solution to the problem, which is fantastic.
Christopher Penn 31:56
Exactly.
So that’s, that’s the the national app.
If you’d like to learn more about some of the Search Console stuff I was talking about.
Here’s the shameless plug for our Search Console course.
We also have a new course on Google Analytics 4.
But any, any parting thoughts, John?
John Wall 32:14
No, I think that’s pretty solid.
I mean, again, this is something you should be doing if you’re a marketer.
That’s if you don’t know what’s going on with this, get to it and start asking some questions because you can save yourself a whole lot of headache,
Christopher Penn 32:25
and bring beer.
Folks, we will see you all next week.
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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.
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