It was Wednesday morning, 3 May, 7am. I woke up in a nice little hotel near Hide Park in London, the sun was shining for the first time this year, and I had an Emetrics Summit to go to. Life can be beautiful…
After a real English breakfast with eggs and beans, Aurélie and I went of to the one and only real Emetrics Summit that was presented by Jim Sterne and with numerous interesting speakers and slots!!!
According to Jim Sterne, the Emetrics Summits stands for: ‘focus on clickthroughs, pageviews and revenues. But measuring website success now includes a much broader range of methods and the finer points of web analytics will be reviewed as well. Emetrics tries to answer question like:
• How do you measure the success of your web efforts?
• How do you gauge the impact your website has on loyalty?
• What about the intranet?
• What *might* you measure? And much more.’
Expectations were high. And I must admit, they were met!
The summit was organised in the Radisson Hotel near Portman Square in London and covered 3 full days of Web Analytics topics and discussions.
We heard some new and very exciting views on Web Analytics.
The Buzz word that turned up in almost all presentations was ‘Personas’.
It’s very much related to segmentation but the goal is to find out what it is that our visitors are interested in, how the website can serve their needs, etc. before analysis is undergone. It’s not about clicks. It’s about people!
Another statement that caught my eye was during the presentation of Jim Sterne: ’It’s not about the numbers. It’s about the trends!’
There are a lot of reasons why Web Analytics reports are still not 100% accurate. Different cookie deletion rates, different data capturing techniques, different data integration methods and different result interpretation approaches are just a few of the reasons.
Combining trends with segmentation and personas is the ideal mix.
Also very interesting was the topic ‘Behavioural Targeting on your site’ presented by Matthew Tod.
Matthew sees that when a customer or prospect interacts with your site, their behaviour is telling you: what they are searching for, what they are interested in, how close to a purchase decision they are and if they are looking for help with a previous purchase. So, organisations should take advantage of this interaction to trigger the campaign, which could be targeted to anonymous individuals or known people, and should be done through multiple channels. But be aware that this is real-time interaction!
And then there was Brian Eisenberg talking about ‘Persuasive Architecture’.
What could seem logical to most of us, isn’t always applied in the real world.
A simple example Brian discussed. If you send out an email campaign that has a certain lay-out and colour, and includes a particular image, re-use this on the landing page and on the homepage of your site. Visitors have a particular goal in mind, and this goal drives their use. So make sure you show them the content they want to see, or at least, put easy links to the desired content to persuade them to follow the path you want them to take. All depends of course on the action you want the visitor to take, and on who you are trying to persuade. The conversion rate is a measure of the ability to persuade your visitors to take the action you want them to take.
But not only the speakers and the presentations taught us new things about Web Analytics. The discussions we had with the other attendees of the conference (our conference-buddies…) were quite refreshing as well.
This conference was a very good opportunity to meet the analytics community face-to-face and to exchange ideas and experiences with the WA consultants and integrators from all over the world.
And we came to the conclusion that we are not doing that bad in Belgium or on the continent!
Web Analytics is still quite young and the learning curve is remains long. But whereas Web Analytics used to cover 10% of the time of the person in charge last year, this grew up to 30% this year. Let’s hope we reach 50% in the next year…
End of this first episode.
Keep a close eye on how we have digested our eMetric summit experiences.
OX2 Web Analytics Blog 
October 23, 2006 at 12:16 am
[…] I came to the eMetrics summit with a lot of questions and reflections about my own work over the past few years. Amongst which, some were answered; others emanated into new interrogations. Just like what happened in May in London, when I first attended an eMetrics summit, the first time I heard Avinash Kaushik speak about expensive consultants […]