Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
00:03:34 · Ari Paparo, Alex Cone
[00:03:34] S0: Since the last time you were on the pod, lots changed. [00:03:38] S2: A lot. It has changed a little bit. I will say I... I'm a... As you know, I'm an avid listener, and I I don't know if I need to have a fortune cookie ads take You can? [00:03:48] S0: To get going. Is is Google... Is... Are we gonna have g cookie coming out soon? [00:03:52] S2: I I guess I have no idea. [00:03:53] S0: You try to stay away from cookies. [00:03:55] S2: No. It has been a while. Thanks for having me back back on. Last time you're I'm on I'm working for my jacket. [00:04:01] S0: Last time you're on was an epic episode. It's literally my favorite episode because we just, like, hammered it out, like, for forty five minutes about The Sandbox. But we have you on again because you have new news. What are you doing in London? What's going on in London? [00:04:14] S2: So I came actually to just see a bunch of industry folks that are at the IAB Tech Lab Summit. It's always a great place to go to, have conversations similar to Marketecture Live, which I was at in Chicago. [00:04:29] S0: Appreciate that. Appreciate you being a loyal Marketecture attendee. So, you know, let's start with your job. Like, you're kind of in an interesting job because you don't sell ads. You don't buy ads. You don't really help with the ad tech stuff. Like, you're in the Chrome team. So tell us what is your job?
00:04:29 · Ari Paparo, Alex Cone
[00:04:29] S0: Appreciate that. Appreciate you being a loyal Marketecture attendee. So, you know, let's start with your job. Like, you're kind of in an interesting job because you don't sell ads. You don't buy ads. You don't really help with the ad tech stuff. Like, you're in the Chrome team. So tell us what is your job? [00:04:45] S2: Yeah. So I work work, on the part of the Chrome team that's focused on the web ecosystem, and that includes the platform that is the web. I think a lot of people think about the web as just the browser, but it is... It's a platform, and it happens to be an open platform. And so in addition to building things like APIs for developers and businesses to use, to build out really awesome experiences, we also do things that are focused on, like, can we advance things in the ecosystem? To give you an example of that, you may be asking about this in a second. The thing that I'm gonna talk about is actually inspired by something we've done called Core Web Vitals, which is like a feature of the browser to share data with the ecosystem to focus folks on, like, things like speed. So I... I'm only telling you that to say, like, think about a product manager in Chrome working on the web ecosystem team. Like, yes, we build APIs, but we also think about ways that we can get the ecosystem focus on improving experiences. [00:05:47] S0: Oh, yeah. So why don't we start with Web Vitals because they've been around for a while. So Sure. Why don't you just set the baseline for people who don't know what Web Vitals are?
00:05:47 · Ari Paparo, Alex Cone
[00:05:47] S0: Oh, yeah. So why don't we start with Web Vitals because they've been around for a while. So Sure. Why don't you just set the baseline for people who don't know what Web Vitals are? [00:05:55] S2: Yeah. So Web Vitals, there's there's three, and we call them Core Web Vitals. And they measure three things. How fast the page is loading or the user perceives the page loading, how responsive the site is. So think about when you like tap something and it doesn't immediately respond, that's very annoying. Yeah. It is. And then how stable the layout of the page is. So, like, if the page is, like, janking around on you, also not the best thing in the world. [00:06:23] S0: Hate that. [00:06:24] S2: So Core Web Vitals does two things. It it gives people, like, basically, census level data about how they kind of compare to their peers. So it's, like, web wide data that we share, but we also build APIs that allow folks to measure them for themselves. [00:06:40] S0: Right. Like a developer can open up the Chrome developer Yep. Little panel on the right side, and they can measure the Core Web Vitals of their own website while they're developing.
00:06:40 · Ari Paparo, Alex Cone
[00:06:40] S0: Right. Like a developer can open up the Chrome developer Yep. Little panel on the right side, and they can measure the Core Web Vitals of their own website while they're developing. [00:06:49] S2: Yep. And then, like, it's really... It's taken off. Like, it... This... I I cannot take any credit for this. I work with the team that that built these, and they're awesome. But, like, their whole mentality was, hey, as Google, we want the web to be fast and... But we shouldn't necessarily be opinionated about how people make it fast, But, like, helping people focus on a set of metrics when there's a million things you could potentially do and call them fast. Like, picking a few things that we've now standardized, across browsers for the most part, was really a big piece of it. Right? Like, so, yeah. It it... It's been around now, for quite a few years, and, like, there's been an ecosystem that developed around it. Like, people compete on, like, having faster Core Web Vitals scores, [00:07:43] S0: which is pretty cool. It's great to have a benchmark. So before we move on to the advertising, I just wanna ask some clarifying questions. So you say it's census level. How is it collected? Is it fully opt in, partial opt in? Is it, you know, is it every Chrome browser?
00:07:43 · Ari Paparo, Alex Cone
[00:07:43] S0: which is pretty cool. It's great to have a benchmark. So before we move on to the advertising, I just wanna ask some clarifying questions. So you say it's census level. How is it collected? Is it fully opt in, partial opt in? Is it, you know, is it every Chrome browser? [00:07:55] S2: Yeah. So we have we have docs about it that everyone can go read. If you look up Chrome User Experience Report, we will... No. I'm just... Because I'm gonna summarize. But if people are like, hey. What... How's Chrome collecting stuff? But, yes, users, are able to control whether they send data back to the browser for us to optimize web experiences and search, and that is what goes into it. And it's the data that we have is is Chrome too. So, like, when we are sharing this data, this is the data, right, like, that that we also have, like, in our our logs. [00:08:28] S0: Got it. Okay. So we're here to talk about the latest sort of extension to this platform that you've rolled out. That's the Chrome User Experience Report, also known as the Chrome UX Report. Now this has a acronym called Crux, which is an acronym crime, I believe, because there's no way to put these words in order to spell crux. Could we talk about the acronym first? [00:08:55] S2: I did not create the acronym. I have a cool hat, that says Chrome User Experience Report, and I have thought about this a lot that it's not a sequentially correct acronym. [00:09:05] S0: It should be c u [00:09:06] S2: r It's a cool sounding acronym. At least it has a good ring to it. But...
00:09:06 · Alex Cone, Ari Paparo
[00:09:06] S2: r It's a cool sounding acronym. At least it has a good ring to it. But... [00:09:11] S0: Okay. I'm gonna call it Kirk Kirk's from now. [00:09:14] S2: I think I think... Just think Chrome UX with no h in Chrome. [00:09:20] S0: Okay. Crux. We will have to accept. Pro... This is a... Accrux. Okay. Yeah. What what is Crux? [00:09:28] S2: Yeah. So Crux is the Chrome User Experience Report and it is available in in two forms, like, for people to consume... Well, two sort of technical forms for people to consume. We've got an API, which you can call, for free, and then a BigQuery project that you can... That we drop every month, that has, like, data and dimensions in it as well. We also have built a visualization for it, but there's a bunch of other companies that have built on top of our APIs to build visualizations of this data. So, like, I just think about it mostly as an API and a BigQuery project. [00:10:05] S0: Right. And so we're evaluating websites or URLs Yep. Is the demand... Is the key dimension. And then what are we getting for that? What are what are the variables that we're Yeah. Looking