Simo Ahava is a recognized expert on customizing web analytics and tag management solutions to improve the entire 'life cycle' of data collection, processing, and reporting. His main areas of expertise lie with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, and Google has appointed him as a Google Developer Expert in these fields. He is especially interested in communication structures within organizations, as he firmly believes that communication breakdowns are the underlying cause to practically all data-related problems. Simo is particularly invested in demystifying analytics development work, and his main focus is on increasing awareness, skills, and critical thinking around data and development. Simo is also co-founder of Simmer, an online learning platform for technical marketers.
I'm an instructor at Simmer, a company I co-founded in 2020. Simmer is an online learning platform for technical marketers. My specialties as an instructor are tag management, online analytics, web browsers, and building multi-disciplinary teams.
As a Growth Partner at Reaktor Ventures, my role is to support, educate, and spar our portfolio companies in the arts of analytics, growth, and critical thinking. Our portfolio is filled to the brim with some of the best startups in the Nordic region.
Helping startups find scalable ways to grow their customer base is our task.
As a Production Director I am in charge of overseeing NetBooster Finland's overall project portfolio, managing and distributing project resources, and supervising our production unit. In this position, I have the key duties of making sure our production unit is equipped to not only provide the best possible quality to our customers, but also to keep tabs on their project portfolios and day-to-day work. I am also in charge of developing our processes for production, sales support, and HR, together with the CEO and Sales Director. I am also part of the executive board of NetBooster Finland.
As SEO Manager, I am the team leader of our search engine optimization team. In practice. this means I chair our weekly meetings, make sure enough resources are appointed to our projects, take part in the most crucial SEO sales cases, develop our processes, templates, and guidelines, act as the "face" of our company's SEO offering, keep up-to-date on the latest trends in the world of digital marketing, make sure that our SEO team is equipped to provide nothing but premium quality to our clients, and provide new team processes for all of our company to benchmark against.
I am also deeply invested in advanced web analytics, and I am more than happy to provide consultation for web analytics implementations, integrations, customizations, and advanced setups. My main areas of focus are eCommerce setups, multi-layered tag setups, data layer optimization, custom JavaScript work (e.g. with third party APIs), tag management systems, and solving analytics problems. I am most comfortable with Google Analytics (where I hold the Individual Qualification certificate) and Google Tag Manager, but I've also used a number of other analytics tools in the market over the years. Besides, web analytics is not a question of what tool one uses, but how one uses it.
I also speak at seminars and hold training sessions in SEO and web analytics, ranging from beginner to advanced level.
As a Certified Scrum Product Owner I was responsible for organizing and managing the day-to-day activities of our Scrum development teams.
These activities included, but were not limited to, designing, implementing, deploying, documenting, testing and training the company's various software solutions.
I was also the product manager of a number of Innofactor's legacy products.
As a sales and project manager I took part in the sales process of the company's IT solutions. In addition to the sales process, I managed a number of projects, and I was the account manager for a large number of the company's private sector accounts.
As a sales and project manager, my main areas of expertise were CMS solutions, CMS consultation, content management, consulting and training.
I took part in the design, compilation, documentation and overall project management for HARES, a digital corpus of recorded speech. My work focused on designing an audio archive which allows the users to treat the audio as primary data. I also developed the XML schema for HARES, and did most of the transcription and annotation work. I used HARES to write my Master's thesis, as well as a peer-reviewed academic article on how HARES can be used to re-evaluate syntactic phenomena in the English language.
Master of Arts (M.A.)
English philology, General linguistics, North American studies