For the tenth anniversary of MeasureCamp Berlin, I went back. I had already been there in 2016, for the very first edition, then in 2023. This year I changed how I travelled: I took the night train.
At Woptimo, we are committed to reducing our carbon footprint, and the train was the best option. The scheduled journey was already sixteen hours. The train was delayed by another seven hours. It takes a certain patience. I still arrived in Berlin in time for MeasureCamp.
As in previous years, SumUp hosted the event in its offices: pleasant spaces, well suited to running the sessions.
The sessions
Laura Semeraro (The Social Hub): BigQuery and agentic AI
Laura Semeraro presented BigQuery Agentic AI, and with it a shift in the digital analyst's role. Supplying tracking is no longer enough. Our job is first to produce context, so that conversational AIs can go and fetch the collected data themselves.
The prerequisites she mentioned are Gemini Data Analytics, Gemini for Google Cloud and Knowledge Catalog. Once the context and the semantic layer are in place, the agent can be published, then connected to a conversational AI.
My session: the HTML dashboard, then the video
I picked up what Morgan and I had presented two weeks earlier in London. A small room, quite full, and the atmosphere stayed friendly.
I showed, in concrete terms, what we see as the future of the dashboard. In place of a reporting tool such as Data Studio, we now build our dashboards in HTML, with the open-source Observable library. That gives a great deal of freedom over the visualisations, and over how the report is organised.
This approach raises questions about exposing the data. They can be solved with a host such as Cloudflare Pages, or by building a dedicated extranet. That second path is the one we chose at Woptimo.
I closed with our latest R&D work, a direct extension of the dashboard: automatically creating videos from the data. Using real public data, we showed a video that quickly sheds light on SumUp's visibility.
Dan Murovtsev (Stape): server-side at the centre of collection
Dan Murovtsev showed that server-side GTM can go well beyond working around ITP and ad blockers. It can become the central point of server-to-server collection, and the preferred endpoint for every building block of the digital ecosystem: CRM, payment system, and the rest.
Niek Schlepers: bots that come through server-side
Niek Schlepers presented a study run over several months of data passed through TAGGRS. About 5% of the hits that go through server-side GTM would come from bots, in particular the Meta bots meta-externalagent and meta-webindexer.
In rare cases, under 0.07%, these bots even trigger transaction hits. Advertising robots crawl order confirmation pages and fire a purchase again. The best protection remains filtering upstream, with a tool of the Cloudflare type.
Martin Frotzler: explaining variations with BigQuery
Martin Frotzler showed how he uses Power BI to build dashboards that rely on the BigQuery function AI.KEY_DRIVERS. The setup takes a little work. Once it is in place, you can use the feature fully, and see which dimensions explain certain changes.
WalkerOS, an alternative worth knowing
I skipped the last two sessions to talk with Alexander Kirtzel. For several years he has been developing WalkerOS, an open-source tag management system that deserves to be better known. It is a genuine alternative to Google Tag Manager, and a tool thought through much more carefully than Matomo Tag Manager.
WalkerOS sits fully within analytics engineering, with a Git connection and an easier link to AI agents. Tag management now has to be thought of as a major source of information: for the context supplied to AIs, and for compliance audits.
On that point, GTM is an ageing tool. I am glad alternatives are starting to appear. In a world where sovereignty is becoming a major issue, questioning some habits may become necessary.
What I take away
AI is now a central tool for digital analysts. Not everyone uses it in the same way, but practices are changing. The industry is starting to turn away from web analytics tool interfaces, in favour of data tools and conversational AI.
A new world is opening up. Woptimo is here to help you see it more clearly, and to make your data speak.